Devouring the Green: Fear of a Human Planet: An Anthology of New Writing

Organized around a series of questions drawing attention to how the 21st century has complicated our experiences of nature, the body, and human activity, Devouring the Green pushes an exciting range of contemporary poets to resist nostalgic, simplified notions of our human place in the world and, rather, to focus unflinchingly on the many ways we entangle with-and, by our presence, irrevocably change-the world around us. The poems gathered here are alternately visionary, wry, celebratory, angry, elegiac, and apocalyptic-dizzyingly broad in their scope and, above all else, timely. This is a wonderfully unique, ambitious, and challenging anthology. - Wayne Miller, poet & editor, The City, Our City and Literary Publishing in the 21st Century What a harrowing and ultimately energizing anthology Sam Witt has created in Devouring the Green. Here, the human merges with the cyborg or, in moments that seem both Whitmanian and darkly fabulist, all of us merge uncomfortably with the natural world we are, simultaneously, destroying. Would you call humans an invasive species? Witt asks in one of his many prompts that inspired the poets in this collection. Are the dead an invasive species? Wild, visionary, and cacophonous, these poems work to position our selves anew and, so, ask us to think about our responsibilities to others and to our environment in radical, discomforting ways. - Kevin Prufer, poet and editor, Churches and Into English: An Anthology of Multiple Translations