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Abstract
Ecopoetics is a contested term, one defined by its capaciousness. Through its focus on deep ecology, it draws together the world system and the individual, the collective and the singular, and the global and the placed-based within its dialectical framework, without resolving any of these oppositions. Instead, the apparent contradictions underlying ecopoetics offer productive material for a poetic praxis that aims to foreground the complex connections that string together nature, culture, politics, and society. Forrest Gander’s Twice Alive engages with these contradictions in an attempt to foreground the intimacy of ecological thinking, and its basis in personal connections that are both affective and biological. By doing so, it models the possibilities of a poetics that opposes the extractivist notion of nature’s exteriorization and separateness from human society. Through this poetics, Gander critiques the anthropocentricism that underlies both the nature-society binary and certain forms of nature poetry, particularly those based on Romantic models of nature as a poetic resource for the elevation of the poet above the nonhuman world.
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Recommended Citation
Storey, Thomas.
"The Radical Potential of Ecopoetics: Ecological Intimacy in Forrest Gander’s Twice Alive."
Critical Humanities
3,
2
(2025).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33470/2836-3140.1059