Devouring the Green: Fear of a Human Planet: An Anthology of New Writing - Tapa blanda

“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

Sam Witt is poetry editor of Jaded Ibis Press and author of the poetry collections, Everlasting Quail (UPNE, 2001), winner of the Katherine Nason Bakeless Prize, and Sunflower Brother (Cleveland State University Press, 2006). Awards include the Red Hen Press Poetry Award, Pitch Poetry Award and Meridian Editors’ Prize. Individual poems and articles have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Wired, Computerworld, San Francisco Chronicle, Black Warrior Review and New England Review, among many others. He has taught at Harvard University and Whitman College and is now Assistant Professor of English, Creative Writing, at Framingham State University.