POETRY FROM SPACESHIP EARTH EMPIRE AND

RAHIMTOOLA, SAMIA

ISBN 10: 168597063X / ISBN 13: 9781685970635

Published by University Of Iowa Press, 2026

About this Item

Seller Inventory # NW9781685970635

Bibliographic Details

• Title: POETRY FROM SPACESHIP EARTH EMPIRE AND
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 168597063X
• ISBN 13: 9781685970635
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: NEW

About this title

Synopsis

In the early decades of the postwar period, the planetary metaphor of “spaceship Earth” was everywhere in the West. It exerted its power on sites as various as Caribbean research stations, the shipping lanes of the U.S.-occupied Pacific, Palestinian refugee camps, and the internal colonies of segregated nations. At its heart was a new ideology and infrastructure of managing, administering, and rationalizing nature through which Western powers sought to maintain their grip on a decolonizing planet.

Poetry from Spaceship Earth retrieves a diverse array of postwar American poets—Robert Duncan, June Jordan, Joanne Kyger, Lorine Niedecker, and Charles Olson—who contested and cultivated alternatives to this emergent mode of environmentalism. By placing the major innovations of postwar poetry into conversation with environmental politics, Cold War science and technology studies, and postcolonial and Black studies, Samia Rahimtoola develops an original theoretical and historical account of the racial and colonial logics that underpin the supposedly neutral project of managing nature.
 

About the Author

Samia Rahimtoola is assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College. She is author of the creative work Revelation Desert Flow, and her writing has appeared in Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Post45: Contemporaries, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, among others. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.