Overview

Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War offers a groundbreaking and vital perspective on war's destruction of the natural world-the creatures, plants, soil, water, and atmosphere of Earth. In poems and contextual comments, 61 contemporary poets focus on military damages to the ecosystems on six continents and the moon. Framed by a cogent introduction and a pair of forewords, one on the poetry and the other on global consequences, the poems are accompanied by a tally of ecological costs and a set of thought-provoking discussion and writing prompts for teens and adults. This compelling anthology alerts readers to environmental degradation of our planet while affirming nature's resilience and regeneration. The anthology covers almost two millennia, beginning with the Marcomannic Wars (167-180 CE) and ending with the 21st-century wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The conflicts and concomitant environmental damage addressed by the poems are international in scope. Convergence includes ninety poems, each paired with an Author's Note, by U.S. and international poets, including John Balaban, Gillian Clarke, Camille T. Dungy, Ferida Durakovic, W.D. Ehrhart, William Heyen, Cynthia Hogue, Denise Low, Craig Santos Perez, Vivian Faith Prescott, Eric Paul Shaffer, Jillian Sullivan, Brian Turner, Pamela Uschuk, and Mai Der Vang.

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9781734531398

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Reviews

Bringing light to a dark place, these geographically and historically wide-reaching poems illuminate how war pulls, from under our feet, the earth on which we stand and pollutes even the air we breathe. Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War is unique in its scope and its focus on how war's intolerable human cost is inseparable from the devastation of nature and its non-human animals-war against life itself. Though, like green shoots from a charred root, here, too, are poems of eloquent witness to nature's humbling power of resilience and restoration. -Eleanor Wilner, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets This insightful, one-of-a-kind anthology seeks to capture the scale of our staggering inhumanity in war, where restraints are absent. Three gifted editors have chosen poems that bear witness to the environmental ravages of war in hopes of rousing our sensibilities about what we have done to our planet. Convergence may well transform readers' perceptions, motivating them to become better stewards and caregivers of the Earth. -Scott McVay, cetologist, poet, explorer, founding Executive Director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation What powerful poems coeditors Teresa Mei Chuc, Anne Coray, and J. C. Todd have gathered in the splendid new anthology Convergence-a collection that confronts us with the suffering and death inflicted on other-than-human beings by human actions. From ancient Rome to the wars of colonization, through the two World Wars, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the destruction of Gaza, these poems bear eloquent witness to the fact, as Sean Mclain Brown writes in a note to his poem ""Migration,"" ""There are no winners in war."" And as Gillian Clarke comments in her note to ""Lament,"" ""War can't be waged without grave damage to every aspect of life. . . . The ashes of language are the death of truth during war."" Reading this book, may we be changed by it.-Ann Fisher-Wirth, Mississippi Poet Laureate and coeditor, Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology Convergence tells an important story. It's a story for the Earth and for all of humanity. It offers a vital perspective on war history that has rarely been considered, focusing on damage to ecosystems and the flora and fauna that animate them. Organized chronologically, these poems guide us through the deep history of war's impact on the living world, each poem accompanied by a brief statement providing historical context. The inescapable irony is that writing about damage to the natural world is also writing about damage to the human world because the essential principle of ecology is that Earth and all its creatures, including us, are interconnected and interdependent. -Anne McCrary Sullivan, naturalist, poet, author of Notes of A Marine Biologist's Daughter

Author Information

Anne Coray is the author of the novel Lost Mountain (West Margin Press, 2021). She has also published three full-length poetry collections and a chapbook on climate change. She is a co-editor of Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment (University of Alaska Press, 2008), and her work has appeared in the Southern Review, the Northwest Review, the North American Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry, and other literary magazines. The recipient of fellowships from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation, she divides her time between Homer and her birthplace on remote Lake Clark (Qizhjeh Vena), in southwest Alaska. J. C. Todd is the author of six collections of poetry, including Beyond Repair, a special selection for the Able Muse Book Award, and the bilingual (English and Lithuanian) What Kept Me Awake? / Kas neleido uzmitgti? (PDR Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her fellowships include those from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Bemis Center, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and several artist residency programs. She was awarded the 2016 Rita Dove Poetry Prize from the International Writing Centers Association. She lives in Philadelphia. jc-todd.com Teresa Mei Chuc (a.k.a. Tuệ Mỹ Chúc) was born in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam, shortly after the American War and grew up in Pasadena, California. A former Altadena Poet Laureate and Altadena Editor-in-Chief (2018-2020), Teresa is the author of three books of poetry: Invisible Light (ManyVoices Press, 2018), Keeper of the Winds (FootHills Publishing, 2014), and Red Thread (Fithian Press, 2012). Her poetry appears in numerous anthologies, including Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2025). Teresa is in her twentieth year of teaching English in public middle and high schools in Los Angeles.

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