I’m working on my first scholarly book project, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, which is under an advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press. Grave Dangers defines “the Anthropocene” as a heuristic through which to consider the intertwined legacies of intra- and inter-species violence that results in a range of extinction events, including not only the sixth mass extinction event commonly associated with the epoch but also the extinction of races and ethnicities, whether genocidally or ontologically. Studies that intertwine environmental and anti-racist goals tend to focus upon the shared causes and effects of environmental devastation and racist violence. My focus on extinction, however, highlights a problem with that approach. Narratives of ecological extinction call upon us to construe “extinction” solely as biospheric collapse, and therefore as something to be unilaterally mourned. Yet in the United States, as Christina Sharpe writes, the “atmospheric density” of the afterlife of slavery has become “the total environment”—an environment that can hardly be mourned from an anti-racist perspective. Grave Dangers is therefore premised on the conflict between the wake being for the climate and the wake being the climate, which is a problematic that Anthropocene studies has largely avoided through a recourse to vitalism and life itself as categorical ethical imperatives.

Accordingly, Grave Dangers argues that Anthropocene studies requires a more robust framework for dwelling within death that neither courts vitalism nor thanatopolitics—and, further, contends that resources for that framework are plentiful in American poetry and poetics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The period’s poets experiment extensively with rhetorical modes of engaging with death (as demonstrated by the period’s innovations to the elegiac mode) and with material explorations of death (as can be seen with the substantial number of major poets in the period with interests in the occult). Further, the poets in Grave Dangers recognize “the wake” not as a discrete component of the funeral industry, which developed into its modern form during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but as a comprehensive analytic that constitutively structures the world in which they reside. I argue that twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets comprise a shadow network of death workers that treat the dead—and death itself—with an array of forms of care, including healing, redress, remorse, and love. In chapters on Lucille Clifton; Langston Hughes; Sylvia Plath; James Merrill and Robert Lowell; and Natalie Diaz, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Diana Khoi Nguyen, as well as an autotheoretical coda, Grave Dangers imagines a death-focused ethics that allows us to attend to ecological devastation in a manner that prioritizes care work toward BIPOC grief and suffering.

Earlier versions of part of my arguments on Clifton and on Plath can be found, respectively, in “Poetic Networks Begin After Death: On Lucille Clifton’s Spirit-Writings” (College Literature 47.1) and “Anthropocene Ethics and its Lapses: Lyric Eros, Racism, and the Example of Sylvia Plath’s Bees” (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 28.3).