<i>Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry</i> by Judith Rauscher (A Book Review)
Abstract
Twenty years into the 21st century, the matters of forced mobilities, relocations and displacement are more than ever issues at hand, as we keep on witnessing ceaseless global migratory movements resulting from political persecutions, wars, violence, and/or climate change. Taking the cue from the intersections of environmental transformations, global ecological crisis and human mass mobilities, Judith Rauscher’s Ecopoetic Place-Making (2023) focuses on contemporary “American ecopoetries of migration,” namely the “the oeuvres of […] chosen poets that prominently feature American places and American histories of displacement” (2023: 31). Drawing mostly from the fields of Ecocriticism and Mobilities Studies, her work explores the complex relationship between migratory subjects and the non-human world, in particular, “the many ways in which human-nature relations are shaped by physical and geographical movement, whether voluntary or forced” (2023: 34) as well as “the varying effects that these displacements in place and between places have […] on the environmental imaginaries in the works of contemporary American poets of migration” (2023: 24). Ecopoetic Place-Making offers an interesting and thought-provoking analysis of five contemporary authors (Craig Santos Perez, Juliana Spahr, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, and Etel Adnan), migrants of different national, cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Drawing inspiration from their own experiences of mobilities, these poets, through their works, challenge restrictive and exclusive ideas of place-attachment. This text is a critical review of Judith Rauscher's monograph.
Keywords
ecopoetics; place-making; place; mobilities; poetry; oetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry; Judith Rauscher; book review; ecocriticism; mobilities studies; American poetry; American literature
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The Sapienza University of Rome/University of Silesia in Katowice Italy
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9678-7842
Carlotta Ferrando is a PhD student in English Literature, Language and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome (curriculum in Literary Studies), in cotutelle with the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. She graduated in July 2021 with an MA degree from the Programme in Comparative Literatures (University of Turin) having defended her dissertation on contemporary American Literature titled “Family Dynamics in Blank Coming-of-Age Novels: Less Than Zero, The Lost Language of Cranes and Generation X,” after obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Italian Literature. She is currently working on a PhD project focused on the representation of female mental illness in contemporary American novels. She is a member of AISNA.
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