New vocabulary for a world on the brink
The Anthropocene is a term proposed for the present geological epoch
(from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards) to highlight the
role of humanity in the transformation of earth's environment globally,
has become the subject of scholarship not only in the sciences, but also
in the arts and humanities as well. Ecopoetics, a multidisciplinary
approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and
theory as well as emphasizing innovative approaches common to conceptual
poetry, rose out of the late 20th-century awareness of ecology and
concerns of environmental disaster.
Collected from contributors including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, and
Christopher Cokinos, and together a monument to human responsiveness and
invention, Counter-Desecration is a book of ecopoetics that compiles
terms--borrowed, invented, recast--that help configure or elaborate
human engagement with place. There are no analogous volumes in the field
of ecocriticism and ecopoetics. The individual entries, each a sketch or
a notion, through some ecopoetic lens--anti-colonialism, bioregionalism,
ecological (im)balance, indigeneity, resource extraction, extinction,
habitat loss, environmental justice, queerness, attentiveness,
sustainability--focus and configure the emerging relations and effects
of the Anthropocene. Each entry is a work of art concerned with
contemporary poetics and environmental justice backed with sound
observation and scholarship.
