Overview

Dirt is a long narrative poem, an ecopoetic memoir in verse, tracing the life of a woman who, in her forties, takes up homesteading in an attempt to put down roots and to forge a meaningful connection with the land. The story begins with the woman's childhood, growing up in a bland suburban housing development with no sense of history or culture or indeed an identifiable past of any sort. The poem addresses issues of exoticism and the gaze, of memory and forgetting, particularly intergenerational memory and the ways it can be disrupted and destroyed. It interrogates the white, middle-class ethos of suburbia: how it fails those children who grow up in such an insular world, providing them with neither any real community nor a viable sense of moral values, leaving them empty and ill-prepared to engage with others in an increasingly global world. A cautionary tale, it reveals both the human and environmental consequences of growing up in a spiritual and cultural wasteland.

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Author Information

Jennifer Handy is the author of the poetry chapbooks California Burning (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and Dirt (Finishing Line Press, 2025). She is the recipient of a Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship for poetry.

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