A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and
the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist
Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.
In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar
Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden
in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she
moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held
strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in
their gardens.
In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility
and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants,
herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and
treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why
cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national
discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.
Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature
writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize
the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the
land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests
beneath their feet is home.
