Just Labor
Press 53 Silver Concho Series, 2025
ISBN 978-1-950413-96-6
New from Press 53's Silver Concho Poetry Series edited by Pamela Uschuk & William Pitt Root
Publication date: March 27 at AWP (booth 1118)
From the Introduction by Jim Peterson:
There are many poems in this collection that will slay you—and not gently—then make you beg for more, that will break your heart, reveal some necessary but difficult truth at the core of who and what we are, and otherwise wake you up from the stupor of your daily trance. Mingling the language of the cotton mill and its machines with the language of desperate love and longing, Street reveals the harsh yet beautiful lives of women working in the unjust conditions of the mills, the earthy ebb and flow of their exhausted bodies.
This is just some of the best damn writing I’ve encountered anywhere. The language throughout is simultaneously compressed and sharp, cutting and repairing as it goes. But we will never completely heal from the images and stories of this amazing collection. Nor should we.
Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology
Trinity University Press, 2025
ISBN 9781595343086
The Ecopoetry Anthology is the authoritative book of contemporary American poetry about nature and the environment. Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, the editors of the daring first volume, have reunited to create Attached to the Living World. The second anthology explores the issues and conversations in ecopoetry over the pastdecade and features more than 150 established and emerging poets, including Mildred Barya, Nickole Brown, Simmons Buntin, Lauren Camp, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Vievee Francis, CMarie Fuhrman, Ross Gay, Erin Hollowell, Marie Howe, Petra Kuppers, J. Drew Lanham, Ada Limόn, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, January Gill O’Neil, Catherine Pierce, Tracy K. Smith, Brian Teare, and Natasha Tretheway. With a foreword by Camille Dungy and an introduction by Margaret Ronda, the poems gathered here provide vital visions to nurture our imaginations and spur us to act.
A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia
University of Georgia Press, 2019
ISBN 978-0820356242
NOW IN PAPERBACK! (2025)
ISBN 978-0820374505
Getting acquainted with local flora and fauna is the perfect way to begin to understand the wonder of nature. The natural environment of Southern Appalachia, with habitats that span the Blue Ridge to the Cumberland Plateau, is one of the most biodiverse on earth. A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia ― a hybrid literary and natural history anthology ― showcases sixty of the many species indigenous to the region. Stunning images by seven Southern Appalachian artists and conversationally written natural history information complement contemporary poems from writers such as Ellen Bryant Voigt, Wendell Berry, Janisse Ray, Sean Hill, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Deborah A. Miranda, Ron Rash, and Mary Oliver. Their insights illuminate the wonders of the mountain South, fostering intimate connections. The guide is an invitation to get to know Appalachia in the broadest, most poetic sense.
Shift Work
Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018
8.5" x 5.5" single signature with hand sewn binding
In Shift Work, Laura-Gray Street explores the often overlooked role of women and femininity in the historical struggle for dignity in work. She treats poetics as as much a form of labor as textiles. The threads connect to create a collection that is at once personal and historical, abstract and grounded, in the factory, in the home, and as bloody as needlework can be.
The Ecopoetry Anthology
Trinity University Press, 2013
ISBN 978-1-595341-46-4
Definitive and daring, The Ecopoetry Anthology is the authoritative collection of contemporary American poetry about nature and the environment--in all its glory and challenge. From praise to lament, the work covers the range of human response to an increasingly complex and often disturbing natural world and inquires of our human place in a vastness beyond the human.
To establish the antecedents of today's writing, The Ecopoetry Anthology presents a historical section that includes poetry written from roughly the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Iconic American poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are followed by more modern poets like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and even more recent foundational work by poets like Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, and Muriel Rukeyser. With subtle discernment, the editors portray our country's rich heritage and dramatic range of writing about the natural world around us.
This groundbreaking collection has the capacity to transform people's lives aesthetically and politically. Poetry's eloquent and ineffable power can work to enhance our understanding of the world beyond the human and lead us to act with more respect, humility, and stewardship toward the environment.
Pigment and Fume
Salmon Poetry, 2014
ISBN 978-1-908836-76-2
The poems of Pigment and Fume explore, scavenge, celebrate, and interrogate—by hook and crook, riff and raff, physics and ekphrastics, instinct and ecstasy—the natural world and the nature of our relationships. If ecology is the study of the planetary household, Pigment and Fume studies literal and metaphorical houses poem by poem and builds them toward a larger, ever-entangling whole.
Bristling both with linguistic and psychic energy, weighed down by the detritus of the daily, there’s nothing personal about these very personal poems: the radiating I/eye is bathed in landscape, but the environment’s never reduced to nature as the Emersonian familiar. Everywhere dense, intelligent qualification, everywhere music and rangy diction charged with the overloaded agitation that defines our time.
— Ira Sadoff