Routledge Companion To Ecopoetics

Fiedorczuk, Julia

Routledge

Quetchenbach, Bernard W.

Newell, Mary

Tierney, Orchid

New York : Routledge, 2024

Each iteration ends with a last word: respectively, petromonster stomachs stomachs flesh filters gyres stomachs sympathy sympathy gyres gyres gyres gyres gyres nylon-riots. Which is to say, begin with the petromonster and the inevitable interconnection of all things will give even Buddha a stomach ache. One hopes we will riot against feeding the monster like nylon metaphorically protests against itself strangling the planet. For this poem, while powerful (and moving when chanted out loud), isn’t worth its root source. 
—Eileen R. Tabios\nOnly an innovative, critical eco-poetics can track language unit by unit while simultaneously showing us nasty fibrous bits from the clothes washer that spill into the food-chain in our water systems. In her new, impressive (and pointedly impressing) chapbook, poet Orchid Tierney melds together units of speech simulating or riming with the synthetic microfibers of polyester (how appropriate for our post-postmodern times!). Her page by page, ever expanding text adds phrasal chunks together in cumulative strings mimicking the gross indignities we inflict on the natural world. (If you eat fish, the poet tells us, you can be sure that you’re also eating plastic.) And her methodology similarly reminds us of parsed sentences, of dependent clauses trapped like splintered shards inside independent ones, at their beginning, middle, and end. The ultimate chop and change of generative language globs. Accruing, accumulating, like clogged up lengths of stringy garbage. “[An] amputated sea welts sympathy,” we’re told, and we can sympathize graphically: a living praxis of mish-mashed phrases coiled to the point where our brains actually throb. Positing an inventive, water testing vocabulary to outline what we do to our ecosystems likewise. 
—Stephen Bett, author of Back Principles: a book of spiritual fatigue\nIt is with intuition rather than calculation that Tierney's #ocean plastic# forages, gathers and arranges. With intuition chosen over calculation, Tierney's unit of measure is a unit of matter. Responding to the pipeline with the ethics of the poetic line, Tierney's particular attention models a dwelling among that can teach both how and why we might turn the plastic we find into an ecology of ethics. 
—Michelle Taransky\nIn ocean plastic, Orchid Tierney takes us deep into the Pacific Gyre, where we watch the garbage vortex form with toxic inevitability. Phrases accumulate, combine, and recombine to convey the mixing of chemicals and doomed sea life, a mix that gains in its pull the more is added to it. Deadly suction builds with every stanza. As phrases fragment and fragment again, we watch the chopping of living organisms caught in the vortex, plastics grinding them into a recipe neither wholly unnatural nor redeemably natural. 
—Anne-Adele Wight, author of The Age of Greenhouses and An Internet of Containment\nOrchid Tierney is from Aotearoa-New Zealand, currently residing in Philadelphia. Her chapbooks include Brachiation (Dunedin: GumTree Press, 2012), The World in Small Parts (Chicago: Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Gallipoli Diaries (GaussPDF), and a full-length sound translation of the Book of Margery Kempe, Earsay (TrollThread, 2016). Her collection a year of misreading the wildcats is forthcoming from The Operating System. She co-edits Supplement, an annual anthology on Philadelphia writing.

ocean plastic

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

BlazeVOX Books

"This book is evidence of unusually ebullient thinking about the spongy and interbred archives of petropolitics &amp; necropolitics--life and death produced for/from the manna of fossil fuels--which Tierney parses, imbricates, and translates into poems that are wet and living, petrified and stony, made of paper and people, just like the range of archives she plumbs....This is a work of remarkable insight, confident tonal variance, and playful intelligence." - Divya Victor, author of Kith
"This haunting and profound collection explores the traces of petroleum refineries, factories, landfills, train stations, nuclear power plants, and other sacrifice zones in the United States, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and the Pacific Islands. Throughout, Tierney creates an archive of oily verse, cut-up essays, textual collage, and actual polaroids to capture the elastic entanglements between 'humans' and the 'planet, ' between 'carbonauts' and the 'plastisphere.' As companion readers, we are guided into the troubling 'Urf' and urged to discuss: Can poetry help us navigate unseen ecologies? Can poetry become a carbon sink? Can poetry metabolize the world so that we can continue to grow and love with 'concussive tenderness'?" --Craig Santos Perez
"a year of misreading the wildcats follows intrepid petronaut Orchid Tierney as she painstakingly assembles a nonce archive of the 'waste - natures that coagulate' at the watery peripheries of northeastern U.S. cities like Philadelphia, Camden, and Boston. What moves me most about these 'carbifereous lamentations - of plastimodernity' is that Tierney's docunaut is no impartial archon, but rather a deeply intricated, implicated, and impassioned environmental advocate and cultural critic. Knowing that "the poetics I have imagined are not sustainable, not extreme enough to handle the carbon in the atmosphere or the plastic in the oceans, ' she asks the most difficult question facing us at this historical moment: what does it mean 'to know our extinction, and do it anyway'? In place of an answer, this book offers a stance, a way of relating to the great acceleration of waste with which we're all complicit: 'in such traces, I lung with ash, /ambulate with love and venom.'" --Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days
Excerpts / previous versions appear at Radioactive Moat and Pacifica Review wildcat: a boring, an aperture, an exploratory well. 'a year of misreading the wildcats' unravels a sprawling, year-long encounter with petroleum that began with a strip of plastic, caught between the branches of a maidenhair tree. This hybrid collection of poetry, prose and Polaroid photography drills the archive for film scores, fiction, and scholarship to recover the intertextual saturations of plastic and plankton, oil and oceans. Toggling between phantom islands and garbage gyres, the Pacific and Pennsylvania, a year of misreading the wildcats documents the impossible project of both environmental literature and photography to critique and catalogue disaster. This collection is a refusal for a narrative, where climate change denies the islands' one.

A Year of Misreading the Wildcats

Operating System

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