How poetry can help us think about and live in the Anthropocene by reframing our intimate relationship with geological time
 

The Anthropocene describes how humanity has radically intruded into deep time, the vast timescales that shape the Earth system and all life-forms that it supports. The challenge it poses—how to live in our present moment alongside deep pasts and futures—brings into sharp focus the importance of grasping the nature of our intimate relationship with geological time. In Anthropocene Poetics, David Farrier shows how contemporary poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Evelyn Reilly, and Christian Bök, among others, provides us with frameworks for thinking about this uncanny sense of time.

Looking at a diverse array of lyric and avant-garde poetry from three interrelated perspectives—the Anthropocene and the “material turn” in environmental philosophy; the Plantationocene and the role of global capitalism in environmental crisis; and the emergence of multispecies ethics and extinction studies—Farrier rethinks the environmental humanities from a literary critical perspective. Anthropocene Poetics puts a concern with deep time at the center, defining a new poetics for thinking through humanity’s role as geological agents, the devastation caused by resource extraction, and the looming extinction crisis. 

Can plants move? Can they think? Can they act? In Radical Science, Mary Bowden shows that debates about plants’ capabilities are not new but can be traced to the nineteenth century, where they moved from scientific inquiries to popular articles and literary fiction. Examining the work of nineteenth-century physiological botanists, Bowden expands beyond Charles Darwin’s work in the field to uncover the full story of these debates and the impacts they had on literature, culture, and people. While many have interpreted the frequent comparisons between plants and people in nineteenth-century literature to be exemplary of aesthetic values or sexual symbolism, Bowden maintains that comparisons between plants and women, members of the working class, and people of color reiterate botanical debates about how to recognize agency in beings that are assumed to be passive. Studying the scientific texts of Darwin and Maria Elizabetha Jacson alongside social problem novels by Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley and early science fiction by H. G. Wells, Radical Science foregrounds the connection between science and literature and ultimately suggests that we look to the propositions of nineteenth-century physiological botany to find more sustaining models of social and environmental relationship.