I’m working on my first scholarly book project, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, which is under an advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press. Grave Dangers defines “the Anthropocene” as a heuristic through which to consider the intertwined legacies of intra- and inter-species violence. Studies that intertwine environmental and anti-racist goals tend to focus upon the shared causes and effects of environmental devastation and racist violence. Grave Dangers is less focused on the causes and more committed to imagining modes of ethical relation can bear up to the effects.

Accordingly, Grave Dangers argues that Anthropocene studies requires a more robust framework for dwelling within death that neither courts vitalism nor allies itself with necropolitics. Further, it contends that resources for that framework are plentiful in American poetry and poetics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The period’s poets experiment extensively with rhetorical modes of engaging with death (as demonstrated by the period’s innovations to the elegiac mode) and with material explorations of death (as can be seen with the substantial number of major poets in the period with interests in the occult), recognizing “the wake” not as a discrete component of the funeral industry, which developed into its modern form during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but as a comprehensive analytic that constitutively structures the world in which they reside.

I read twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets as a network of death workers. The first part of the book, titled “Orientations,” explores alternate philosophies of death by reading two poets—Lucille Clifton and Langston Hughes—as epistemologists who conceptualize death and the dead in ways that buck the broader United States’s increasing trend toward weaponizing death or minimizing its significance. The second part, titled “Practices,” shifts to reading poets as makers who center death to imagine modes of existence for humans and nonhumans that run counter to dominant and normative models, with differing degrees of hospitality for racial minorities. These multi-author chapters are organized historically, with one (on Sylvia Plath and James Merrill) examining midcentury nuclear anxiety and the other (on M. NourbeSe Philip, Layli Long Soldier, Monica Ong, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Keith S. Wilson) reading visual poetics as a practice of communal care and mourning in the contemporary moment. Ultimately, Grave Dangers imagines a death-focused ethics conducive to attending to ecological devastation in a manner that prioritizes the grief and suffering of Brown and Black people.

An earlier portion of my argument on Clifton can be found in “Poetic Networks Begin After Death: On Lucille Clifton’s Spirit-Writings” (College Literature 47.1). An earlier portion of my argument on Plath is in the article “Anthropocene Ethics and its Lapses: Lyric Eros, Racism, and the Example of Sylvia Plath’s Bees” (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 28.3).