Description
Poetry. Ecopoet Heidi Lynn Staples asks, in the poems of A**A*A*A, "How can one proactively fashion one's awareness to invoke a rapturous wonder reckoning with a rapacious plunder?" Referring to an indigenous name for the land we call Alabama—Albamaha—Staples undertakes, often with her young daughter, a two-year anthropological and psychological interaction with the Mobile Bay Watershed. These poems index human encounters with the region's heritage—an area dubbed by biologists as America's Amazon—and, it is hoped, they contribute to conservation efforts by helping to inspire what physicist Jane Bennett calls "ethical generosity." Using type, icons, symbols, and whimsy, Staples layers a visual element into her urgent poems.
Author Bio
Heidi Lynn Staples's debut collection, GUESS CAN GALLOP, won the 2004 New Issues Poetry Prize. She is also the author of DOG GIRL (Ahsahta Press, 2007), NOISE EVENT (Ahsahta Press, 2013), drawn from the ecology of her native Gulf Coast, and A**A*A*A (Ahsahta Press, 2018). She has also published a nonfiction work, Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake (Caketrain, 2012). American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She serves as English-language editor of the global poetry initiative Duniyaadaari, and with the poet Amy King, edited Poets for Living Waters, an international response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, with continued sites of action; and BIG ENERGY POETS: WHEN ECOPOETRY THINKS CLIMATE CHANGE (BlazeVOX, 2018). She lives with her partner and daughter in the Appalachian Highlands on Ruffner Mountain, neighbors with the imperiled tricolored bat.
Author City: ATHENS, GA USA