Affect and Environment in Contemporary Ecopoetics

chapter 18
Affect and Environment in Contemporary

Ecopoetics
Margaret Ronda
In recent ecocriticism, the most pervasive approach to the subject of envir-

onmental affects has undoubtedly been the new materialist turn.1 Whether
by emphasizing the existence and force of more-than-human forms – what
Bruno Latour has called “actants” – or by highlighting the corporeal inter-
fusion of human bodies with material entities, new materialism theorizes
a posthuman subject wholly enmeshed with their surroundings. New mate-
rialist philosopher Rosi Braidotti defines this “enfleshed Deleuzean subject”
as “an ‘in-between’: it is a folding-in of external influences and
a simultaneous unfolding outwards of affects.”2 The vital energy Braidotti
describes as animating the subject extends, as well, to the nonhuman realm,
according to theorists such as Jane Bennett, who argue against a view of
“active subjects” and “passive objects” in favor of a world composed of “lively
and essentially interactive materials,” of “bodies human and nonhuman”
complexly entangled.3 These posthumanist ontologies refuse what Braidotti
terms the “generic figure” of “Man” that has dominated inquiry in the
humanities, arguing instead for radical new forms of “egalitarianism” that
cut across, and serve to undermine, various categorical distinctions.4
These theories conceptualize bodily affects as a shared ontological field.
Drawing on Brian Massumi’s definition of affect as “an ability to affect and
be affected,” affect in new materialism appears as an “intensity” common
to and transmissible across various entities, not only the human.5 Affect is
reframed as what Bennett calls a “geoaffect” or an “impersonal affect” that
appears in nonhuman phenomena such as “technologies, winds, vegeta-
bles, minerals” as well as humans, animals, and other terrestrial beings.6
The affective register becomes the primary means by which we conceive
ourselves as transversal rather than bounded subjects, constituted in and
through common material processes and forms. In learning “to feel myself
as not only human,” as Bennett puts it, we learn to expand our sensory
capacities and to explore unexpected affective affinities with other entities.7
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338 margaret ronda
Reflecting the Deleuzean inheritance of these accounts, there is an
emphasis on the sensuous, even erotic corporealities of various forms of
matter in relation. From Braidotti’s description of the subject as a “piece of
meat activated by electric waves of desire” to Karen Barad’s assertion that
“materiality itself is always already a desiring dynamism, a reiterative
reconfiguring, energized and energizing, enlivened and enlivening,” new
materialism describes the material world as affectively charged with
a positive, amorous liveliness that we participate in as bodily beings.8
Focused on the momentary, potential-filled nature of affect as a charge
that courses through bodies and phenomena, new materialism attends to
the ways these shared affects reveal broader ecological relations as impure,
lively, intercorporeal. By emphasizing the force and energy of material
forms, many of these works counter not only discourses of human excep-
tionalism but what Braidotti calls the “outpour of anxiety” that accom-
panies much environmentalist rhetoric.9 Instead, they describe enmeshed
ecologies in terms that highlight immanence and transcorporeal immer-
sion, arguing for a renewed ethical sense that accompanies these immersive
relations.
These theories find powerful resonance in many recent works of North
American ecopoetics that investigate transcorporeal affects as a means of
thinking beyond anthropocentric logics. Poetry by writers including
Brenda Hillman, Sawako Nakayasu, C.A. Conrad, Ariana Reines, Cody-
Rose Clevidence, Joyelle McSweeney, Gabriel Gudding, Evelyn Reilly,
Jody Gladding, Hoa Nguyen, Angela Rawlings, Myung Mi Kim, Melissa
Mack, and Linda Russo, among others, depicts affective engagements with
the more-than-human world in terms we might call new materialist,
attentive to the ways these affects arise as impersonal and shared rather
than interiorized and private. Delving into extended considerations of
forms of matter from crystals to bark beetles, styrofoam to glaciers, ants
to cow carcasses, these writers highlight the strange dynamics of and
uncanny intimacies with these lively forms. Such explorations yield por-
trayals of subjects “in-between,” to use Braidotti’s phrase, centered on
embodied perspective embedded in a material surround. As an emergent
poetic field whose development is coterminous with the rise of posthuma-
nist and new materialist theories, ecopoetics is often defined by its practi-
tioners by this deprioritizing of the anthropocentric in favor of more
decentered affective engagements. As Reilly writes in an essay on ecopoetic
principles and practices: “Ecopoetics reflects yet another in a series of
human decenterings, as from an ecological perspective, the self dissolves
into the gene pool and the species into the ecosystem. In fact, ecopoetics
Affect and Environment in Contemporary Ecopoetics 339
requires the abandonment of the idea of center for a position in an
infinitely extensive net of relations.”10
To take just one recent example of this ecopoetic endeavor, acclaimed
poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge often explores encounters with plants, ani-
mals, clothing, air, trees, and qualities of light to highlight the affective
mutuality of these charged moments. In one poem, “Glitter,” from her
most recent book, Hello, the Roses (2013), Berssenbrugge depicts a dynamic
interaction with a violet that creates a sensation of shared identity:
I stop and welcome it, cooing, walking around it, not as if I were floating,
but the surface of the world circled unfurling petals.
Person and violet with so little in common my voice reveals as a resonance of
unmanifest identity.
The violet, looking back, loses objectivity and enters the expansion of
recognized things.
You could say our identities reach out to encompass the forest environment,
like telepathy; a moment opens space by rendering it transparent in inten-
sified consciousness.11
These lines portray a momentary act of attentiveness that involves both violet
and person, rendering both as sentient, perceiving beings. The apostrophic
gesture here serves to embed the speaker more deeply in her surround, as the
speaker’s “voice” becomes the locus of deep resonance between entities rather
than a sign of distinction between human and silent other. Through the
vibrancy of sound and color occurring in this heightened moment and the
series of similes Berssenbrugge deploys, a shared register of sensation emerges.
Berssenbrugge foregrounds the intensities of “surfaces” here – “glitter, the
mirror,” petals, color – as they reorient attention in lateral ways. Such
moments lead not to any grand epiphanic revelation; instead, they cultivate
an awareness of what Berssenbrugge terms “the energy between people and
plants” as an ever-present field of affective potentiality (60).12 These poetic
practices reorient attention, then, to the sensuous phenomenologies of every-
day life, offering a capacious lexicon for envisioning forms of ecological
responsiveness that do not center on anthropocentrism.
Yet for all their power and promise, such methods provide only a partial
approach to the complex psychic conditions of our ecological present, the
time of the Anthropocene. From the radical upheavals associated with
climate change to other forms of ecological devastation such as deforesta-
tion, pollution, and species extinction, the Anthropocene is characterized
by unprecedented, anthropogenically-produced transformations to the
Earth’s systems.13 For climate scientists and environmental historians, the
340 margaret ronda
Anthropocene not only denotes the geological imprint of this activity and
its various impacts on earth systems, but is also a term that reflects
a dawning awareness of the outsized impact of humans on planetary
life.14 In the face of these realities, urgent new questions about individual
and collective affective experience arise, beyond the purview of posthuma-
nist discourse. How can we understand the processes by which we come to
register and interiorize a sense of profound environmental alteration? How
do these processes unmake or reshape feelings of ecological relationality?
How might they affect conceptions of self-identity, social existence, and
understandings of the human and develop new forms of kinship with other
beings? In what ways do new reckonings with the scale and speed of
planetary change and with complex dynamics of vulnerability and account-
ability find subjective expression, both in everyday responses and in the
mediations of literary (and particularly poetic) form?
To understand the constitution and effects of these difficult questions,
we must turn, I argue, not to theories of ontological immanence but to
developmental models of subject-formation such as object-relations the-
ory. Object-relations approaches stress the complex processes by which
a person comes to understand herself as at once differentiated and
dependent, agential and susceptible. These psychic modes, in turn,
depend on a conception of subject formation as irreducibly relational –
a relationality built as much on antagonism and recognitions of differ-
ence as on intimacy and immersion. Developed by figures such as
Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, and further theorized by Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick and Barbara Johnson, object-relations theory con-
siders how psychic development proceeds not only through human
interaction but through relations with other others: objects, elemental
conditions, the “holding environment.” As Sedgwick writes of Klein’s
work on subject formation, “human mental life becomes populated, not
with ideas, representations, knowledges, urges, and repressions, but with
things, things with physical properties, including people and hacked-off
bits of people.”15
How we internalize, project onto, negotiate with these forms is central,
in object-relations theory, to how we develop psychic “positions” for
moving through the world (depressive, paranoid-schizoid). These posi-
tions are importantly non-linear, recursive, rather than developmentally
teleological; they involve ongoing practices rather than singular experi-
ences; they reveal our determination by social relations and reflect the ways
those relations can provide emotional sustenance as well as profound harm.
By torquing these methods to address questions of environmental
relationality, we can discover a capacious means of approaching the com-
plex dimensions of affective experience in a time of biospheric crisis. In
turn, various key ecologically-oriented works of poetry, from Inger
Christensen’s groundbreaking alphabet (1981) to recent works by Jorie
Graham and Craig Santos Perez, offer nuanced examinations of these
affective dynamics, creating multi-layered portraits of ecological relation-
ality in the Anthropocene.
Object-Relations Theory and Environmental Affects

For Melanie Klein and other object-relations theorists, nature’s affective
claims on the subject relate back to early psychic formations of depen-
dency, love, and aggression. “The manifold gifts of nature are equated with
whatever we have received in the early days from our mother,” Melanie
Klein writes in her classic essay, “Love, Guilt, and Reparation” (1937).16
Our love for the nonhuman world is connected to a recognition of basic
reliance on its phenomena and processes, which we unconsciously associate
with early experiences of care, Klein argues. Both the maternal figure and
the natural world generate feelings of security connected to the fulfillment
of essential needs and the sense of physical safety, warmth, and well-
being.17 Another early feeling that emerges, both in relation to human
figures of care and the natural world, is perceptual reciprocity.
Psychoanalytic theorist Shierry Weber Nicholsen writes that such “reci-
procity arises within a shared field in which both – indeed, all – parties are
participating.” This field, she continues, is “something that palpably con-
tains us, something we are in and part of” – a “holding environment” that
is responsive and dynamic.18 At the same time, object-relations theory
foregrounds the centrality of negative responses to these formative sub-
jective experiences, which not only involve figures of early care but extend
to elements of the natural world. According to Klein and other object-
relations theorists, we can feel forms of aggression and hostility toward
aspects of our surroundings that mirror our earliest responses to felt
deprivation or neglect.
In turn, we cope with such complex and contradictory feelings through
interactions with introjected objects, an activity that begins in infancy and
continues throughout our lives. Aspects of the nonhuman environment –
weather, plants and trees, animals, rocks, the elements – can become an
object through which the subject engages imaginatively with her earliest
desires, sensations, and fears. These interactions with objects, whether
imagined or material (as in Winnicott’s transitional objects), involve
342 margaret ronda
various forms of destructive fantasy that enact feelings of aggression and
hatred.19 Such fantasies of omnipotence are often accompanied by restora-
tive impulses that attempt symbolically to recuperate the destroyed object.
These dynamics of aggression and guilt, destruction and restoration play
out in the internal world of the child’s developing psyche and form the
basis of her relational identity. The recognition of the survival of these
objects beyond their symbolic destruction becomes a crucial means of
understanding the bounds of self and other, even as these fantasies of
destruction arouse feelings of guilt and a desire to repair damage. Klein
calls the psychic state associated with these feelings the “depressive posi-
tion,” a state grounded in a recognition of otherness and the felt capacity to
love, but also an acknowledgment of real limits and loss. For Klein, this is
the position associated with psychic integration and the development of
mature relations. It is also the position from which we can act on feelings of
kinship and communal identification, including the bonds that exceed the
human.
While Klein understands human interactions with the nonhuman
environment to be a reflection of our earliest intersubjective relations,
she also stresses the real consequences of these interactions as they move
beyond the symbolic and into the actual. In several places across her body
of work, Klein highlights the ways natural phenomena and processes are
susceptible to real violence and exploitation. In “Love, Guilt, and
Reparation,” she discusses how those who live in adverse environmental
conditions understand their surroundings as a “grudging and exacting
mother, whose gifts must be forcibly extolled from her.”20 By drawing
attention to this forcible appropriation of nature’s resources, Klein ges-
tures, however obliquely, toward the larger dynamics of extraction and
exploitation that characterize modern socioecological relations at
a systemic level.21 Stressing the ways anthropogenic activity harnesses
nature’s capacity to create and destroy, Klein describes how these appro-
priative modes are material extensions of certain psychic tendencies.
Klein provides another example of these psychic dynamics in a late essay,
“On the Sense of Loneliness” (1963), where she describes an adult patient
whose childhood relationship to the countryside had provided psychic
recompense for a difficult family life. As a child, the patient had believed
that any damage he did to elements of the landscape – robbing nests,
damaging hedges – would be reparable, as nature appeared to him “rich
and invulnerable.”22 This patient caught a field-mouse as a present for his
young child, then placed it in a box in the trunk of his car and forgot about
it until the following day; the mouse had gnawed through the box and
hidden in a far corner of the trunk, where it had died. A cathected object,
this real creature presents a stark contrast to the good object of the pastoral
fields and forests of the patient’s youth. Conveying a vivid manifestation of
larger dynamics of environmental enclosure and destruction, the mouse
undermines the patient’s early psychic fantasy of nature’s self-restorative
qualities, revealing instead the profound vulnerability of the natural world
and dramatizing his own capacity for harm.
In these examples from Klein’s work, early primal anxieties and fantasies
of omnipotence find real-world analogues in environmental activity, from
the everyday to the systemic. She describes the fundamentally depressive
responses that emerge from a recognition of the nonhuman world’s real
susceptibility to anthropogenic harm at various scales. The subject’s devel-
opment into mature awareness involves, then, not only a consciousness of
her immersion within and dependence on the natural world but
a reckoning with the consequences of the exploitative or violent action
she participates in, directly or indirectly. Thus while her theories do not
engage with the particular affective implications of ecological crisis, Klein’s
writings on the dynamics of environmental response provide essential
groundwork for such a consideration.
For later psychoanalytic theorists, particularly Harold Searles and Shierry
Weber Nicholsen, awareness of environmental crisis plays a newly determi-
native role in the dynamics of subject constitution.23 Across their work,
both of these writers stress the primacy of the nonhuman environment to
the ongoing creation of subjectivity and relational bonds. Nicholsen writes
of ecological surroundings in The Love of Nature and the End of the World
(2002): “in being an environ, surrounding us and gathering us inside itself,
it gets inside us, providing the very ground of our being as a felt sense of
interiority.”24 According to Searles and Nicholsen, such interiorized identi-
fication with qualities of the natural world, from the elements we rely on for
survival to particular dimensions of a deeply familiar environment, is
a foundational aspect of object relations, facilitating the development of
perceptual, phenomenological, and ethical capacities. Yet what happens,
these thinkers ask, when a grounding belief in the stability of the containing
environment becomes endangered or entirely unavailable amidst turbulent
conditions of ecological instability? In his groundbreaking essay from 1972,
“Unconscious Processes in Relation to the Environmental Crisis,” Searles
argues that the pervasiveness of ecological threats – from DDT contamina-
tion to air pollution, radioactive waste to the possibility of nuclear cata-
clysm – creates an abiding sense of paranoia and fears about the health of
our own bodies, the stability of ecosystems and biospheric processes, and
344 margaret ronda
the sustained existence of planetary life.25 We respond to these realities,
Searles argues, with numbing apathy and depression, as well as through
omnipotent fantasies involving technological solutions to conditions of
planetary crisis.26 In Nicholsen’s work, the psychological effects of rapid,
unpredictable ecological change are comparable, though in a more muted
register, to other experiences of trauma. These responses often return the
subject to “the dreadful anxieties first encountered in early infancy: the fear
of annihilation, of utter loss of orientation, of abandonment,” while also
invoking feelings of denial or sublimated guilt.27
At the same time, all these theorists provide accounts of more
integrated forms of relationality that can emerge through practices of
reparation and processes of mourning, activities that gain new reso-
nance in an era of pronounced biospheric crisis. In Klein’s theory,
these reparative practices begin in the depressive position, with the
impulse to reconstitute objects into something resembling a new whole
that will then bestow new dimensions of security and meaning on the
subject. This process of reconstitution is fundamentally imaginative,
occurring not only in child’s play but through lifelong creative acts.
Through these practices, a more ethically-based awareness of the other,
and a corresponding impulse toward care and love for the self, can
emerge. For Searles and Nicholsen, processes of mourning similarly
allow for realistic assessments of what is lost, what remains, and what
can emerge or be assembled anew from present conditions. Mourning
is a means of taking measure, accounting for responsibility, and learn-
ing to cope with altered circumstances, Nicholsen asserts. Above all,
she writes, mourning involves “learning from experience, in that some-
thing of the experience is taken inside and becomes part of who we
now are.”28 Such experiential learning becomes a critical need in a time
that demands new forms of psychological adaptability and resilience.
Object-relations theories thus offer a useful corrective to recent theore-
tical approaches that privilege ecological mutuality at the expense of
examining more ambivalent, even contradictory dynamics of environmen-
tal identification, care, detachment, appropriation, and violence. By pro-
viding an account of these dynamics, object-relations theory presents
a compelling itinerary for tracking affective responses to the forms of
precarity, at once universal and differentially distributed, that are charac-
teristic of Anthropocene life. In her recent book, The Mushroom at the End
of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), Anna
Lowenhaupt Tsing argues that rather than being an exceptional or unusual
state, “precarity is the condition of our time.”29 She goes on:
Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable
encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable
to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting
assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the
status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive.30
To persist within these new normative conditions of ecological precarity,
Tsing argues that we need to develop new “arts of noticing” that attend to
the complex lifeworlds that ecological entities and phenomena dwell
within. Her own book demonstrates such an engagement via its extended
consideration of the socioecological networks of the matsutake mush-
room within the larger planetary whole. Though it does not draw in any
way on psychoanalytic theory, this text might be approached as an
intellectual project in the reparative mode that Klein and other object-
relations theorists describe, rescaled to ecocritical proportions. This
reparative mode begins in an acknowledgment of ecological precarity
and relations of mutual dependence, and it attempts to discover forms of
ongoing life in capitalist ruins by working through a particular object,
considering its various forms of appearance and reconstitution in dis-
turbed ecologies.31
Similarly, various recent works of ecologically-oriented poetry under-
take an object-relations approach that formalizes and responds to the
intense, disturbing realities of biospheric change, often through extended
meditations on particular ecological phenomena. Like Tsing’s ecocritical
endeavor, these texts often do not draw directly on the resources of
psychoanalytic thought, but their essential orientations and themes can
be broadly understood within its parameters. Exploring the constitution of
subjectivity in the Anthropocene as defined by new reckonings with
ecological precarity, these works engage in mournful and reparative prac-
tices that elaborate various dimensions of feeling-in-relation. As they evoke
these complex affective responses, they also develop “arts of noticing,” alert
to new patterns and reconstituted forms of ecological existence that emerge
in precarious times. In this sense, the poem itself becomes what D.W.
Winnicott calls a “third area,” a site of creative activity that facilitates the
working-through of difficult and contradictory affects.32
Depressive Ecopoetics
“Apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist,” begins Inger Christensen’s
acclaimed poetic meditation on ecological sustenance and planetary cala-
mity, alphabet.33 This book-length poem, a foundational work of
346 margaret ronda
contemporary ecopoetics and a template for subsequent texts, opens with
this single line, calling forth the simple figure of fruit trees as an emblem of
the regenerative and nourishing presence of the natural world. Employing
an abecedarian form and the Fibonacci sequence as formal principles,
alphabet surveys the systemic order and complexity of all that “exists,”
beginning with this simple image of ecological continuity and then
expanding outward. Seasons, weather, animal and plant life, planetary
forces and processes, chemical elements, children, all enter the expanding
catalog of Christensen’s poem. In the early sections, accretive repetitions
serve to name these various living entities, gathering them in their variety as
common “small beings” inhabiting the planet:
life, the air we inhale exists
a lightness in it all, a likeness in it all,
an equation, an open and transferable expression
in it all, and as tree after tree foams up in
early summer, a passion, a passion in it all (alphabet, 33)
Such images invest all beings with a common vitality that is “transfer-
able” and shared. As in Berssenbrugge’s poem, this section of alphabet
employs a language of “likeness” that draws various entities into
relations of fundamental similitude. Christensen celebrates the natural
intelligence of ecological entities, the capacity for “thinking” that
animates a “cloud,” “a leaf on a tree,” “lichen” and “grubs,” connect-
ing human perception with these nonhuman beings in their shared
sensory capacities (alphabet, 42).
Through these portrayals, Christensen illustrates the vast, complex
system of planetary life in its cycles of generation, death, decay, and
regeneration, within which human life is only one component. At the
same time, she imbues these various ecological presences with subjective
significance: these entities dwell not only in the world but “in the heart”
and in human memory, as in an image of the speaker’s grandmother
cooking dried apricots, indelibly brought forth by the smell of the fruit
(alphabet, 19). They live, as well, in “names” – “names like narwhal / nettle,
names like carnation, tawny owl / and nightjar, names like nightingale,
new moon” – that inscribe the complexity of human experiential engage-
ment with other beings in linguistic form (alphabet, 63). With their
sensory-rich language of curiosity and delight, these early sections evoke
the qualities of phenomenological immersion and perceptual reciprocity
that theorists such as Nicholsen associate with early ecological develop-
ment and affective response.
Yet as alphabet progresses, the book turns from celebratory chronicles of
the manifold forms of earthly existence to more disturbing apprehensions
of the imminent possibility of planetary calamity, reframing earlier ecolo-
gical entities in newly damaged, vulnerable terms. This turn unfolds, early
in the book, with an introduction of the conditional tense: “The king-
fisher’s miniplunge into blue-frozen / March streams exists, if streams
exist; / if oxygen in streams exist” (alphabet, 20). Here the poem’s assertive
chronicle of ongoing presence shifts into a recognition of newfound
uncertainty about the continuing endurance of elemental phenomena.
“Atom bombs exist,” Christensen writes, detailing haunting apocalyptic
images of denuded landscapes covered with ash: “snow / is not snow at all /
when it snows / in mid-June” (alphabet, 24, 35). Such scenes name real
events – Christensen mentions Hiroshima, Nagasaki, nuclear experiments
in the Pacific – and also gesture toward future cataclysm. Earlier images of
trees flowering and snow covering the ground reemerge here as omens of
the capacity for all life to “vanish” in an instant of white darkness: “the
darkness is white, but not / white like the white that existed / when fruit
trees existed, their blossoms so white” (alphabet, 21). Christensen sets these
decreative images of an all-destroying whiteness in an uncanny past tense,
as if written from an almost unimaginable future of atomic aftermath. The
affectively flat tone of these lines intimates a traumatized perspective whose
response is characterized by numb despondency.
Alongside these images of future cataclysm, Christensen unfolds scenes
of everyday slow violence, where “defoliants” and other environmental
toxins degrade ecosystems at a more incremental pace (alphabet, 54).34
Echoing Rachel Carson’s images of the gradual degradation of soil, water,
air, and ecosystems in Silent Spring (1962), Christensen’s text registers slow
processes of “vanishing,” as “the ground is dusty with sickness” and apricot
trees bear a “thin veil on the outspread branches” (26). alphabet points, as
well, to the extractivist logics that govern anthropogenic activity, from “ore
in the mountain” to scenes of intensive agricultural production and factory
life (alphabet, 44). Through these various scenes portraying the exploita-
tion, reconfiguration, and degradation of the energetic capacities of human
and nonhuman life, Christensen forwards a key claim: humans have lost
the “capacity to / think of nothing” (alphabet, 40). The aggressive, omni-
potent nature of anthropogenic ingenuity, whether materialized in eco-
nomic systems or in weapons of mass destruction, seems utterly boundless
in its ability to create, exploit, accelerate, destroy. These capacities have
fostered an inability for humans to be still or slow, to “think of nothing,” to
remain attuned to larger biospheric cycles and processes. Instead, we are
348 margaret ronda
intervening in, altering, and unmaking these processes at all turns. “We /
ensure ourselves all or / nothing,” Christensen writes, so that “the crucial /
nothing gets no chance / to make the poetry / that wind can make / in air
and water” (alphabet, 41).
Across its sections, alphabet undertakes a sustained depressive inquiry
into the affective dimensions of these profound changes as they reveal new
scales of anthropogenic agency and planetary vulnerability. It does so
primarily by meditating on the changing presence and potential absence
of various natural objects it calls forth, from apricot trees to birds and
flowers. First presented in the fullness and simplicity of their existence,
these entities are transfigured over the course of the poem into vulnerable,
damaged beings whose continuing presence can no longer be assured. By
the final sequences, the repeated naming of entities that “exist” has been
replaced by evocations of beings that are “vanishing” or may be lost
entirely. Through these figurative transformations, Christensen indicates
that our capacities to extract, appropriate, transform, and destroy threaten
to separate us irrevocably from our bonds of “likeness” with other beings
and to unmake the complex systems of biospheric life. In this way, the
poem’s appreciation for the formally intricate and dynamic nature of
ecological interdependence becomes irrevocably bound up with an aware-
ness of its profound fragility. This fundamental uncertainty about plane-
tary viability continues through the poem’s last lines, which refuse any
sense of comforting closure. At the end of alphabet, Christensen under-
scores the way ordinary life – the speaker sitting in her apartment, writing;
doves flying outside; the setting moon – is overwritten by calamitous
potential, as these images transform into darker figurations of a post-
apocalyptic scene of burned fields, with little hope for new growth.
At the same time, the poem itself becomes a reparative practice, reflect-
ing on these aggressive, world-destroying anthropogenic systems and
attempting to find compensation through its own creative activity.
Christensen points to her own act of writing as forging images that
mimic elements in the natural world: “I write like wind”; “I write like
the water’s edge / writes a tideline / of seaweed and shells” (alphabet, 59).
Through such lines, Christensen describes her writing as offering
a compensatory reconfiguration of the seasons, natural cycles, the ele-
ments, the living body, imaginatively restoring relationality through this
pattern of similes. Through the creative work of writing, the poet can
imaginatively reconstruct these formal patterns, not as mimetic reflections
but as reconstituted forms that remain available for what Eve Sedgwick
calls “nourishment and comfort.”35 Emerging from and offering
a reflection on the depressive position in a time of planetary crisis, this
poem’s reanimation of the natural world materializes in poetic language
a longing for an untroubled ecological wholeness. It meditates, as well, on
the difficult feelings elicited by the recognition of ecological damage at
various scales. In the form of this aesthetic artifact itself, Christensen
creates an object that gathers in and works through these affective
responses, developing a new language – an alphabet – for turbulent times.
A variety of contemporary poets, including Cecily Nicholsen, Allison
Cobb, Camille Dungy, Rita Wong, Juliana Spahr, and Cheena Marie Lo,
have taken cues (whether directly or indirectly) from Christensen’s
groundbreaking work, turning poetic attention to dimensions of global
environmental turbulence beyond the nuclear threat. Jorie Graham’s most
recent book, Fast (2017), extends Christensen’s ecopoetic mode to consider
the catastrophic speed of ecological destruction as it reconfigures everyday
affective life. To chart the effects of this hurtling pace, Graham often
employs arrows and long dashes between phrases in long poetic lines and
dense, crowded prose blocks, marking the accelerations of Anthropocene
time and punctuating the poems with a palpable sense of claustrophobia
and impending finitude. “Are we ahead of time or too late?,” she writes in
one poem, “Self Portrait at Three Degrees” (where “three degrees” refers to
current predictions of global temperature rise by the year 2100).36 As this
poem title indicates, Graham’s works are concerned with how our modes
of affective being – our forms of relationality and subjective identification,
as well as our capacity for harm – are forged anew in the context of
ecological turmoil. “Define anthropos. Define human. Where do you
find yourself,” she writes in “Self Portrait” (Fast, 7). These poems proceed
through a kind of internal dialogue with stated questions and halting
answers, or through voices that seem to break in without being fully
understood, mixing an uncanny omniscience with an unknowing perspec-
tive. “When are you going to tell me what is going on. It is going on. The
calculations are off. Something was too long. Some years had to be cut off.
It all had to fit. Who is this talking now” (Fast, 11).
Graham often evokes these redefinitions through extended meditations
on oceanic life and its particular susceptibility to degradation. The ocean,
once a site of profound otherness and mystery, reemerges here as
a damaged and diminished being, subject to sustained anthropogenic
violence. In “Self Portrait,” Graham writes that plankton is “the most
important plant on earth – think love – composes at least half / the
biosphere’s entire primary production – love this – love what – I am saying /
you have no choice” (Fast, 8). Following a Kleinian line, Graham suggests
350 margaret ronda
here that love and survival are indelibly bound; one has “no choice” but to
love what one is so utterly dependent upon. Yet anthropogenic climate
change is causing, among other calamitous changes, a massive die-off of
plankton: “within 50 years if we are lucky – I am writing this in 2015 – like
spraying weedkiller all over the world’s vegetation” (Fast, 8). How can we
reconcile this necessary “love” of this vegetal life with our ongoing, sys-
temic destruction of it? Graham depicts this depressive knowledge as
a psychic weight no one wants to bear: “take it – here you take it, I can’t
hold it anymore – you don’t want it – I / don’t care – you carry it for now –
I need to catch my breath” (Fast, 8). In another poem, “Deep Sea
Trawling,” Graham’s uncannily plural speaker understands her person-
hood to be bound up in and haunted by the violence perpetrated by
humans against other life-forms: “I am haunted but by what? / Human
supremacy? The work of humiliation. The pungency of the pesticide./
What else? The hammer that comes down on the head. / Knocks the eyes
out” (Fast, 7).
Graham’s text draws together these densely woven, intricate considera-
tions of oceanic and biospheric degradation with intimate portrayals of her
cancer treatment and the death of her parents. Images of bodily touch,
breath, motion serve to illuminate the fragility of individual bodies,
a susceptibility we share with flowers, birdlife, aquatic creatures, other
earthly beings. In this way, individual mortality becomes inextricably
bound to larger questions of planetary survival. Graham’s poetry can be
understood as an extended practice of mourning that reckons with losses at
many scales. Like alphabet, Fast also portrays its own creative activity as
a means of working through these losses, discovering a language that can
convey care, love, and attention for what is lost and what continues. Across
the book, Graham turns to sustained descriptions of the patterns and forms
of life in motion, working to make them “visible” – the last word of the
book. Writing in the final poem, “Mother’s Hands Drawing Me,” of
a “swell of wind, billowing, fluent – ink chalk charcoal – sweeps, spirals, /
the river that goes nowhere, that has survived the astonishments,” Graham
cultivates a stance of curiosity, generational continuance, and love that
outlasts loss (Fast, 84).
A recent book by Craig Santos Perez also explores reparative ways of
living on amidst planetary crisis, in poems oriented by gestational time and
attuned to the life-worlds of island ecosystems. In from unincorporated
territory [lukao] (2017), his latest instalment of a poetic series exploring the
indigenous history, ecology, and effects of colonization of Guam, Perez,
a Chamorro poet, turns to personal reflections on conditions of
reproduction and indigenous futurities. In lukao, Perez details the prenatal
development, birth, and early life of his child through a blending of
Chamorro birth rituals and indigenous creation stories, intimate lyrics,
and documentary description of the toxic conditions of Guam and
Hawai’i. Images of reproductive generation, from the prenatal trimesters
through the first year of the infant’s life, emerge next to more disturbing
scenes, local and far-flung: plastic littering the beaches of O’ahu, pesticides
in Guam’s fields and cancer clusters from strontium-90 exposure, ocean
acidification, the extinction of island birds. Contrasting the durability of
synthetic materials and plastic waste products with the infant’s vulnerable
being, Perez writes: “i wish / our daughter was derived / from oil so that she
will survive / our wasteful hands // so that / she, too, will have a ‘great
future.”’37
Throughout the book, the child is evoked both in her miraculous parti-
cularity and as the locus of larger fears of ecological precarity. In “ginen
understory (second trimester),” Perez describes working with his pregnant
partner in the local community garden in Manoa, as they share their fears
about pesticide spray affecting their daughter “whose nerve /endings are just
beginning to root.” As they “dig and plant, //dirt under fingernails,” the
speaker wonders, “what will our children / be able to harvest in this paradise
of fugitive / dust” (lukao, 29). Another piece, “ginen understory (first fever),”
interweaves the newborn baby’s first fever with images of global pandemics
and outbreaks: “when the planet warms, our bodies / host fever chains of
transmission” (lukao, 49). Connecting the intimate with the global, the
vulnerable newborn with other fragile beings such as pilot whales, kingfishers
and native fire trees, Perez offers a powerful meditation on the fears new life
engenders in a time of pronounced catastrophe. “[neni] will be born in april /
of the hottest year in history,” Perez writes in “ginen understory (first
ultrasound)” (lukao, 45).
Yet the baby also becomes a means of meditating on the enduring
possibility of “survivance,” in indigenous scholar Gerald Vizenor’s
term.38 The book describes daily scenes of care for the child’s body as
a form of sacred connection that ties back to ancestral and generational
practices. Perez gathers in birth stories from his family, Hawaiian nursery
rhymes and Chamorro creation myths and chants, placing them alongside
these immediate scenes to reconstitute a new “ocean of stories” to shelter
the child within. Such images of care and indigenous cultural reconstruc-
tion extend outward to local island ecosystems as well, as Perez details the
gardens, foodways, breadfruit trees and coconuts, coral reefs and sea life
that compose the complex web of island life.
352 margaret ronda
Perez’s book ends with a long poem of gratitude, “Mahalo Circle,” for
this intricate network of community – familial, local, islander, genera-
tional, ecological. Saying “Mahalo” to those known and unknown, human
and nonhuman, unborn and ancestral, Perez’s poem works in reparative
fashion to gather together these entities into a new whole. This “Mahalo”
reaches toward the future, conveying a dream of his child “dancing with
our wind and tree relatives, dancing with our water and dirt relatives,
dancing with our fish and bird relatives” (lukao, 83). This reparative image
of the future involves, as well, the ongoing energy of resistance against
imperialism and capitalism as culturally and ecologically destructive forces:
“Mahalo for giving [us] the strength to say: no, [we] won’t let them poison
our land and water anymore, no, [we] won’t let them say our homes are
wastelands or idle assets or military bases// [we] promise to protect and
defend our sacred islands” (lukao, 83). Moving between past and future,
persons and ecosystems, and between positions of dread, resistance, and
praise, Perez’s ecopoetics offers a compelling model for how the creative
work of reparation might be undertaken amidst calamitous times.
Notes
1. For a useful overview of new materialist theory, see Rick Dolphijn and Iris van
der Tuin (eds), New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor:
Open Humanities Press, 2012).
2. Rosa Braidotti, “Teratologies,” in Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds),
Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 159.
3. Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: On Vital Materialism and Object-
Oriented Philosophy,” in Richard Grusin (ed.), The Nonhuman Turn
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 223–240.
4. Rosa Braidotti, “Critical Posthuman Knowledges,” South Atlantic Quarterly
116:1 (2017): 83–96.
5. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (Autumn
1995): 83–109.
6. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010), 61.
7. Ibid. 116.
8. “‘Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns, and remembers’: Interview with
Karen Barad,” in Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism: www.quod.lib
.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/–new-materialism-interviews-carto
graphies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext [last accessed 1 July, 2019].
9. Braidotti, “Critical Posthuman Knowledges,” 87.
10. Evelyn Reilly, “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux,” eco language reader, ed.
Brenda Iijima (Brooklyn, NY: Nightboat Books, 2010), 257.
11. Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge, Hello, the Roses (New York: New Directions, 2013),
47. Further references appear parenthetically.
12. Ibid. 60.
13. See Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2016) for an excellent overview of the historical and geophy-
sical parameters of the Anthropocene concept.
14. Various recent theorists, particularly Andreas Malm and Jason Moore, have
taken issue with the concept of the Anthropocene and its undifferentiated
language of species, pointing to the profound differentiations among popula-
tions in terms of carbon footprints and susceptibility to disaster. Despite its
conceptual shortcomings, however, the Anthropocene remains an important
framework for considering multiscalar dimensions of Earth system
transformations.
15. Eve Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” in
Jonathan Goldberg (ed.), The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011), 126.
16. Melanie Klein, “Love, Guilt, and Reparation,” in Love, Guilt, and Reparation
and Other Works, 1921–1945 (London: Virago Press, 1988), 336.
17. Such descriptions denote the essentialism, repro-normativity, and universalist
language of object-relations theory that queer and critical race theorists such
as Eve Sedgwick and José Muñoz, among others, have critiqued. Both of these
writers also point toward the way aspects of object-relations theory can be
reframed to de-emphasize the normative, heterosexual, and implicitly white
subject of Klein’s theory to attend to more specific and nonlinear aspects of
affective experience. See Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect
Makes,” and José Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, The
Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs 31:3 (Spring
2006), 675–688.
18. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, The Love of Nature and the End of the World: The
Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2002), 64.
19. See D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1989).
20. Klein, “Love, Guilt, and Reparation,” 337.
21. Highlighting maternal care as connected to the unpaid work of natural
processes, Klein’s analysis connects in intriguing ways to recent world-
systems ecological theories that consider the fundamental connection
between the unpaid work of reproductive labor and the appropriation of
nature’s resources as essential components of the capitalist world-ecology. See
Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (London: Verso, 2015).
22. Melanie Klein, “On the Sense of Loneliness,” Envy and Gratitude and Other
Works 1946–1963 (London: Virago Press, 1988), 308.
23. Searles is often credited with inaugurating the field of ecopsychology. For
a compelling account of this field’s methods, see Andy Fisher, Radical
Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2013).
354 margaret ronda
24. Nicholsen, The Love of Nature and the End of the World, 38.
25. Harold Searles, “Unconscious Processes in Relation to the Environmental
Crisis,” Psychoanalytic Review 59:3 (Autumn 1972), 361–374.
26. Today’s version of this belief in technological fixes would be the turn to
geoengineering and other technological solutions to climate change. See Clive
Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), for a recent history of these ideas.
27. Nicholsen, The Love of Nature and the End of the World, 10.
28. Ibid. 181.
29. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
30. Ibid. 20.
31. Other ecocritical projects in this vein would include Donna Haraway’s recent
book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Eduardo
Kohn’s How Forests Think, and Branka Arsić’s Bird Relics.
32. D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in
Playing and Reality, 3.
33. Inger Christensen, alphabet, trans. Susanna Nied (New York: New
Directions, 2000), 11. Further references cited parenthetically in the body of
the chapter.
34. See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
35. Sedgwick writes that “once assembled to one’s specifications, the more
satisfying object is available both to be identified with and to offer nourish-
ment and comfort in turn.” Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative
Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About
You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2002), 128.
36. Jorie Graham, Fast (New York: Ecco/Harper Collins, 2017), 9. Further
references cited parenthetically in the body of the chapter.
37. Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [lukao] (Oakland, CA:
Omnidawn Press, 2017), 13. Further references cited parenthetically in the
text as lukao in the body of the chapter.
38. See Gerald Vizenor, Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

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In recent ecocriticism, the most pervasive approach to the subject of envir-

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