Earth Body

This section weaves the stories of body, land, and biosphere, a selection of poems and essays whose relationships to each other range from obvious to subtle. The pieces explain how the author’s identification with the land, tormented, invaded, exploited, and yet flowering and abundant with life, helped her survive and develop a sense of embodied ecology. Poems and essays in this section find nationalism and ecology entwined with land ownership, Indigenous ancestry with sexuality, sickness with disobedience, civil and otherwise, and the story of two journeys—one of them westbound across the United States, the other a migration later in life back to the land the author grew up on.