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 epistemologies of death by reading three poets—Lucille Clifton, Langston Hughes, and Sylvia Plath—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,” tackles two sets of rhetorical strategies—revision (in Robert Lowell and James Merrill) and visual poetics (M. NourbeSe Philip, Layli LongSoldier, Monica Ong, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Keith Wilson)—poets employ to redress the nation-state’s necropolitics by speaking to and of its dead. Ultimately, Grave Dangers imagines a death-focused ethics that allow us to attend to ecological devastation in a manner that prioritizes the grief and suffering of Brown and Black people.

Earlier versions of part of my arguments on Clifton and on Plath can be found, respectively, in “Poetic Networks Begin After Death: On Lucille Clifton’s Spirit-Writings” (College Literature 47.1) and “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).