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Michael Walsh ed. Queer Nature (Autumn House, 2022, £20.00) Queer Nature, a new anthology of queer ecopoetry edited by poet Michael Walsh and published this year by Autumn House, is generous in its abundance. Spanning three centuries and three hundred plus pages, this collection does not suffer from brevity. Rather, Walsh’s curation is Whitmanian in its inclusivity; it is a collection meant to cover a lot of ground; to fill an apparent void in the canon of ecopoetry; as a curative to correct the record when it comes to queer representation in nature writing. In this way it joins the company of another volume, Camille Dungy’s excellently curated Black Nature, (University of Georgia Press, 2009, $26.95) published a little over a decade earlier, and which covers some of the same queer terrain as Queer Nature, but centers black American voices from a wider time frame— from slavery to present, as Queer Nature’s aperture of mid-19th century on. Both volumes are very American, and while this makes sense for Black Nature it feels a bit more like an afterthought in Queer Nature, which perhaps could have benefited from a subtitle identifying it’s US-centric leanings. Other recent anthologies of queer writing, most notably Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Edited by Paul Maddern) but also 100 Queer Poems (edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan) both of which were published on the other side of the Atlantic, do a much better job at articulating these stakes. Queering The Green sticks to Ireland and doesn’t pretend to represent the global state of queer ecopoetics. 100 Queer Poems is a fascinating collection of queer poetry from all over the world. It includes American poets without centering them as the pre-eminent voices in queer writing. And what a relief: America is not the world, even if Queer Nature might ask us to think so. Queer Nature and Black Nature both offer a radical read of that troublesome noun we call nature. Re-contextualizing the so-called natural world through queer and black poetics these collections complicate and disrupt the typical western, patriarchal, white supremicist and JudeoChristian worldview that demands we consider nature as separate from humanity, and insists on humanity’s domination over it. This work, of revisioning nature through queer and black poetics, is aligned with an awakening of black and queer voices asserting themselves in the culture and the associated backlash. While the rallying cry of ‘Black lives matter’ has been met by certain segments of the population with reactionary protests that ‘all’ or ‘blue’ lives matter and with military-style actions against black and allied protestors, the queering of the natural world, particularly the mass uncloseting of trans and nonbinary people, has also been met with state violence in the form of legislation designed to control the bodies of queer people, police our identities, and with political threats to revert from 21st century legal progress back to the deeply phobic dark ages of the 20th century’s prohibitions on gay sex, gay marriage, and even inter-racial marriage. It turns out questioning the nature of nature is a touchy subject for straight, white, Christian westerners, who seem to be feeling particularly fragile these days, but this follows a type of paranoialaden reasoning: nature is, afterall, a concept that is among the most essential to who we (think we) are. Human nature. The natural order. Nature finds a way. A sign at one local community garden in the city I call home reads ‘nature is always right’ (emphasis added). People of all stripes and walks of life have deeply rooted conceptions of what nature is, who and what should be included or excluded. Black, queer, indigenous, and many 69 POETRY WALES
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othered categories of people have begun to upset the prevailing, white, colonial conception of us (human) vs. them (nature). Indeed, many of the poems in both Black Nature and Queer Nature eviscerate any distinction between subject (us, human) and object (them, nature), bringing humans and our associated habitats, detritus, desires, foibles, and messes squarely on the same page, stanza or line as the clouds-gathering, leaveschanging, grass-waving, ocean-churning, actions of the natural worlds that formerly surrounded us with their othered-ness. And while Black Nature is, rightly, focused on black voices, Queer Nature offers a biodiversity of intersections with interesting results. Placing so many voices from so many periods into this monolithic text creates a queerly disruptive effect, but I wonder if Walsh has thought through what it means to place a white, affluent, academic poet like Richie Hoffman sideby-side with Langston Hughes. This seems to hint at one of the more obvious blindspots of certain segments of white queerdom: chiefly a lack of regard for intersections of race and class. Digging into this conversation between these two poets is instructive. Where each poem is seemingly focused on the breath — Hoffman’s speaker’s open mouth imitating Cicada sounds and Hughes’ speaker breathing fire— there is a disjointedness between the poems that recurs throughout the volume. Hoffman’s poem, Idyll, evokes an almost pleasant struggle with self and transformation, as eerie as the image of a young person sloughing off skin like a molting insect is: the point is that the poem is cozy, comfortable, endowed with a rich feeling of something like hygge despite its clearly uncomfortable subject. Hoffman’s speaker: “When the wind grazes// it’s way toward something colder,/ you too will be changed. One life abrades// another, rough cloth, expostulation.” Hughes’ speaker: “Where is this light/ your eyes see forever?/ And what is this wind/ You touch when you run?” Hoffman’s academic lilt feels impotent in conversation with the firebreathing exclamations of Hughes’ Demand in which the speaker of Hughes’ poem transcends comfort to shout into the void: what is this life and where is taking me? This is not to say that these poems have nothing to say to each other (there is an unmistakable elegance to the feelings evoked by the wind moving through each, across a century) but it is to say that perhaps here is a lost opportunity for deeper conversation that prioritizes race and class. If queering nature is dependent upon the language we circulate and celebrate, then I wonder why Queer Nature often feels so disinterested in selection? The pages are full of the bright, new flowers of American queer ecowriting, from Hoffman, to newcomer Ally Ang, to Charles Jensen, to Chen Chen and Eduardo Corral, alongside perennial favorites like Audre Lorde and Carl Phillips, Mary Oliver, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop and Walt Whitman. The effect is sort of like an untended garden, with weeds, wildflowers, herbs, native shrubs, and heirloom tomatoes sown in a haphazard fashion that can make it a bit overwhelming to wade through . A closer look at the table of contents confirms this: the poems are simply ordered alphabetically by author’s surname. I’m not certain that this a major fault of Queer Nature, but I wonder if there wasn’t a missed opportunity here to organize this show into a suite of rooms (or the garden into intertwining yet distinct beds) as collections often do. But perhaps this is Walsh’s point: that this garden of poems needs to be something untended and like the “wild” (a problematic term in its colonial nature, as Walsh points out). My own understanding of queer ecopoetics is that it embraces the messiness of life, of the varieties of beauty that can exist in the landfill, the ocean, the gutter, and the meadow, all at once. And 70 POETRY WALES

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Michael Walsh ed. Queer Nature (Autumn House, 2022, £20.00)

Queer Nature, a new anthology of queer ecopoetry edited by poet Michael Walsh and published this year by Autumn House, is generous in its abundance. Spanning three centuries and three hundred plus pages, this collection does not suffer from brevity. Rather, Walsh’s curation is Whitmanian in its inclusivity; it is a collection meant to cover a lot of ground; to fill an apparent void in the canon of ecopoetry; as a curative to correct the record when it comes to queer representation in nature writing.

In this way it joins the company of another volume, Camille Dungy’s excellently curated Black Nature, (University of Georgia Press, 2009, $26.95) published a little over a decade earlier, and which covers some of the same queer terrain as Queer Nature, but centers black American voices from a wider time frame— from slavery to present, as Queer Nature’s aperture of mid-19th century on. Both volumes are very American, and while this makes sense for Black Nature it feels a bit more like an afterthought in Queer Nature, which perhaps could have benefited from a subtitle identifying it’s US-centric leanings.

Other recent anthologies of queer writing, most notably Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Edited by Paul Maddern) but also 100 Queer Poems (edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan) both of which were published on the other side of the Atlantic, do a much better job at articulating these stakes. Queering The Green sticks to Ireland and doesn’t pretend to represent the global state of queer ecopoetics. 100 Queer Poems is a fascinating collection of queer poetry from all over the world. It includes American poets without centering them as the pre-eminent voices in queer writing. And what a relief: America is not the world, even if Queer Nature might ask us to think so.

Queer Nature and Black Nature both offer a radical read of that troublesome noun we call nature. Re-contextualizing the so-called natural world through queer and black poetics these collections complicate and disrupt the typical western, patriarchal, white supremicist and JudeoChristian worldview that demands we consider nature as separate from humanity, and insists on humanity’s domination over it. This work, of revisioning nature through queer and black poetics, is aligned with an awakening of black and queer voices asserting themselves in the culture and the associated backlash. While the rallying cry of ‘Black lives matter’ has been met by certain segments of the population with reactionary protests that ‘all’ or ‘blue’ lives matter and with military-style actions against black and allied protestors, the queering of the natural world, particularly the mass uncloseting of trans and nonbinary people, has also been met with state violence in the form of legislation designed to control the bodies of queer people, police our identities, and with political threats to revert from 21st century legal progress back to the deeply phobic dark ages of the 20th century’s prohibitions on gay sex, gay marriage, and even inter-racial marriage. It turns out questioning the nature of nature is a touchy subject for straight, white, Christian westerners, who seem to be feeling particularly fragile these days, but this follows a type of paranoialaden reasoning: nature is, afterall, a concept that is among the most essential to who we (think we) are.

Human nature. The natural order. Nature finds a way. A sign at one local community garden in the city I call home reads ‘nature is always right’ (emphasis added). People of all stripes and walks of life have deeply rooted conceptions of what nature is, who and what should be included or excluded. Black, queer, indigenous, and many

69 POETRY WALES

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