The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral
An anthology of innovative nature poetry co-edited with G.C. Waldrep and published by Ahsahta Press in 2012. Gathering work from contemporary experimental poets writing at the intersection of the natural world and digital modernity, the anthology helped define the emerging field of ecopoetics and remains a standard classroom text. 550 pages.
This hefty and gorgeously designed anthology offers an unusual take on pastoral poetry, which might be defined as poems humbled by nature. The editors of this book gathered nature poems from contemporary experimental poets, many of them under 40 years old, to present the natural world through the eyes of, as Corey says in his introduction, “a digital native with dirt between one’s toes,” representing a movement in poetry toward what is sometimes referred to as “ecopoetics." .... This could be the rare poetry anthology that sticks.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
This is radical and needed and terrifying and—whoa, who would’ve thought?—a hell of a lot of fun. By which I think I mean: stimulating, and startling, and diverse enough to take up almost 550 pages with spinning, vivid, yelling, moaning, laughing, observant poems.