“There’s No Place Like Home”: How 21st Century Ecopoetics Cope With Ever-Changing Notions of Home Amidst Environmental Disaster

Abstract

There is a long history of literature that invokes nature through imagery, symbolism, and metaphor. This thesis examines the difference between traditional forms of nature writing and ecopoetics, which is that the latter must make an inherently political argument about how humans should interact with the environment. Through an analysis of four 21st century ecopoetic collections—Iep Jaltok by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, Flare Stacks in Full Bloom by Katherine Hoerth, and Trophic Cascade by Camille T. Dungy— it is evident that the genre of ecopoetry is uniquely equipped, as a literary form, to cope with various kinds of environmental disaster. The findings highlight that recent ecopoetry utilizes familiar literary themes and a common shared language so that it can be used as a coping mechanism. These themes include, but are not limited to, tradition and history, religion, and family. This research demonstrates the utility of ecopoetry because as a genre it is able to take the personal and amplify it to the level of the universal. Ecopoetry\u27s overlap with other fields of scholarship—postcolonial studies, ecotheology, and ecofeminism—is productive for incorporating multiple perspectives and forms of knowledge into environmental discourse