Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change

Contributors include: Stephen Collis, CAConrad, Matthew Cooperman & Aby Kaupang, Adam Dickinson, Suzi F. Garcia, Brenda Hillman, Brenda Iijima, Will Alexander, Kamau Brathwaite, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, George B. Handley, Bhanu Kapil, Yedda Morrison, Rob Nixon, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Lucas de Lima, Eric Magrane, Joyelle McSweeney, Julie Patton, Craig Santos Perez, Evelyn Reilly, Linda Russo, Metta Sáma, Kaia Sand, Kate Schapira, Cecilia Vicuña

"If we can utilize these poets to help us break the mold of hierarchical thinking, of imperialistic impulses and approaches, and if we can move past the distractions of who will be in power next and let these poets help us see and interrogate the structures that support the continued denigration of the planet and people who are dubbed "expendable", the effects of which can be seen in places like Syria and India, then we just might have a chance at possibly impeding the increasing scarcity of resources and destruction for pleasure and profit. With these voices and ideas, we might also upset the routines and beliefs that sustain structures committed to harm." —Amy King, ed. Big Energy Poets

"Join the movement--the transfer of energy from a human body onto the page and into the reader—the power of invisible connective collective corporealities suggested in this collection’s title Big Energy Poets. Read the singular work collected here by some of the most profoundly ambitious poets alive. Swarm with them in their perceptual challenges. Thrum in the wisdom of their suggested readings. Dance in your beings as the ground moves beneath our feet." —Heidi Lynn Staples, ed. Big Energy Poets

Big Energy Poets reads as if it were forced into its structure by the weight of the Earth itself. It gives the reader not only powerful, moving poems, but the theory and practice behind them; it responds to the crisis it contemplates—a crisis that threatens existence—by taking responsibility for its own existence. But this response seems born of another recognition as well: there is no position beyond Earth from which the poet can observe and write. The crisis before us cannot adequately be addressed by poets singing in the empyrean, but maybe humans, working together, and singing together, can do so. Big Energy Poets makes human.

—Shane McCrae

A song of mourning and fury, the Big Energy Poets anthology is an invitation to change the self—and the world—through embodied practice. Amidst ecological catastrophe, listen to the recordings of recently extinct animals while walking through Wal-mart; learn charms for hemlocks to ward off harm; discover the unfamiliar in the familiar in order to re-see; apologize to celery and strawberries. The body of the poem meets here the body of the world: poems mirror the toxic deposits of chemicals in the human blood stream; make dams to release energy from their jagged lines and slashes; turn transcribed blackbird song into lyrics. Converging science and art; ethics, aesthetics, and politics, BOP reminds us that ecopoetics is equal parts what CA Conrad calls a “vibrational absence” and the thrum of the all-that-still-is awakening us into new forms of attention.

—Nomi Stone