Intimate multitudes

Juliana Spahr's ecopoetics

pp. 85-125

in: Meliz Ergin, The ecopoetics of entanglement in contemporary Turkish and American literatures, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This chapter inquires into Juliana Spahr's ecopoetics to tease out entanglements on the level of form and language. First‚ it examines the tangle of various genres and literary traditions that comprise her work. Then it focuses on thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs‚ and "Unnamed DragonFly Species' and "The Incinerator" from Well Then There Now, to explore Spahr's connective reading methodology that interweaves the material and the semiotic, the personal and the political, and the local and the global. Spahr forges a posthumanist poetics that embodies the collective voices of human and nonhuman beings and the dynamic relationalities emerging from the ecological text. Foregrounding three concepts central to Spahr's work—dis/connection, complicity, and accountability—Ergin highlights the entanglement of local and global ecologies and politics, thereby reconfiguring our understanding of temporal and spatial scales.