Edible ecologies stuff Ross Gay's poetic Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015). A fig tree sprawls rich in fruit over a street in Philadelphia, so abundant it almost threatens. A woman “works hard / rinsing and scrubbing / the walk / lest some poor sod / slip on the / silk of a fig / and break his hip.” Lusciousness minimizes the possible damage as the speaker imagines the sod might “reach over to gobble up / the perpetrator.” The speaker's presence serendipitously prevents this injury as the woman offers him figs and “says take / as much as / you can / help me / so I load my / pockets and mouth.” An old woman “loosed one / from a low slung / branch and its eye / wept like hers.” As the number of figs diminishes into hands and mouths, more mouths arrive, “eight or nine,” and the...
Abundance Against Scarcity
Heather Houser writes about contemporary culture, the environment, and science, and is Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. She's written two books: Infowhelm: Environmental Art & Literature in an Age of Data (Columbia UP, 2020) and Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (Columbia UP, 2014). Her articles have appeared in academic journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Public Culture and in public venues such as LitHub, New York Review Daily, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She co-founded Planet Texas 2050, an interdisciplinary climate research “grand challenge” at UT Austin, and is an associate editor at the journal Contemporary Literature.
Heather Houser; Abundance Against Scarcity. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 March 2022; 22 (1): 13–35. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.22.1.0013
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