JADED IBIS PRESS
Devouring the Green: Fear of a Human Planet: An Anthology of New Writing
edited by Sam Witt
art by Christopher Arabadjis
introduction by Sam Witt, preface by Debra Di Blasi, and new contributions by 90 renowned poets.
The inspiration for DEVOURING THE GREEN anthology arose from the editor’s and publisher’s own investigations into new technologies and ecological disasters as related to the art of language.
We invited a diversity of writers to submit poems addressing the ecological, technical and spiritual related to these questions relevant to the world today.
Jaded Ibis Press searches for provocative poetry that maintains a thread to the past while exploring concerns related to human sentience in an increasingly non-sentient world. To this end, DEVOURING THE GREEN anthology of cyborg/eco-poetry questions the increasingly porous border between the world of machines and the world of nature.
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