Geopoetics in Practice

This breakthrough book examines dynamic intersections of poetics and geography. Gathering the essays of an international cohort whose work converges at the crossroads of poetics and the material world, Geopoetics in Practice offers insights into poetry, place, ecology, and writing the world through a critical-creative geographic lens.

This collection approaches geopoetics as a practice by bringing together contemporary geographers, poets, and artists who contribute their research, methodologies, and creative writing. The 24 chapters, divided into the sections “Documenting,” “Reading,” and “Intervening,” poetically engage discourses about space, power, difference, and landscape, as well as about human, non-human, and more-than-human relationships with Earth. Key explorations of this edited volume include how poets engage with geographical phenomena through poetry and how geographers use creativity to explore space, place, and environment.

This book makes a major contribution to the geohumanities and creative geographies by presenting geopoetics as a practice that compels its agents to take action. It will appeal to academics and students in the fields of creative writing, literature, geography, and the environmental and spatial humanities, as well as to readers from outside of the academy interested in where poetry and place overlap.

Eric Magrane is an assistant professor of geography at New Mexico State University. His work takes multiple forms, from scholarly to literary to artistic. He is co-editor of the hybrid field guide/anthology The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide.

Linda Russo, a clinical associate professor at Washington State University, teaches creative writing and literature and directs EcoArts on the Palouse. Her published works include Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way and Participant, both poetry, and the co-edited Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene.

Sarah de Leeuw, a professor with the Northern Medical Program of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine, is a poet, critical geographer, and anti-colonial feminist researcher whose multidisciplinary work focuses on marginalized peoples and places. She is the author of multiple journal papers, entries, chapters, and books (both creative and academic), and a Canada Research Chair in Humanities and Health Inequities.

Craig Santos Perez is an Indigenous Chamorro poet and scholar from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of four collections of poetry and the co-editor of three anthologies. He is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa.