Tell us about your new book. What is its central project?

Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End offers a literary history of the Great Acceleration (1945-present), an era of rapid and unprecedented change to various planetary systems. My book considers an archive of ecologically-oriented poems that explore various dimensions of environmental transformation and biospheric crisis emerging during this period. I argue for poetry's central importance as a literary genre that reflects on these accelerating changes. The book highlights how recent poetic reworkings of older environmentally-grounded forms and modes—such as pastoral, elegy, apostrophe and personification—illuminates new dimensions of socio-ecological transformation. It explores poetic meditations on various forms of remainders, from residual life-worlds and obsolescent goods to waste products and toxic matter, as they reveal the historical nature of what is cast off or left behind. And it investigates the fugitivity of “nature” as an organizing cultural concept, as an imaginative site of creativity, externality, sublimity, health, or replenishment, considering how a variety of poems grapple with the absence of this animating idea.

What got you started thinking about this set of problems in this way?

This book developed out of a very different dissertation on the georgic (a genre that considers agrarian labor and the work of poetry) in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American poetry. There, I was interested in considering how poetry reflects on the historical pressures of changing economic and ecological conditions in a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Remainders takes up those questions, but in relation to a more recent period in American history and its more pronounced dimensions of environmental crisis, and with a broader focus on the various poetic forms and modes that represent these biospheric transformations.

If you could pair your book with one other text, what would you recommend? Why?

Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works. Niedecker's lucid, intricate examinations of ecological interrelation and environmental transformation in her mid-century poems have been a touchstone for me as I've developed this project.

Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End came out in March from Stanford University Press. You can find it here.