Posted March 28, 2022:
My article “Surfacing Ecological Disaster: Poets for Living Waters and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill” has been published in a special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (ZAA): A Quarterly of Language, Literature, and Culture. Edited by Moritz Ingwersen and Timo Müller, this special issue, titled Elemental America, explores how thinking about the elements can offer us new conceptual tools for understanding America today.
I’ve included the abstract below, but you can read my full article HERE.
Abstract
Considering the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Spill, the largest environmental disaster in American history, this article examines the elemental intermixing of oil and water via the chemical agent Corexit, the substantial effects submerging oil into the water column had on ocean life, and the aesthetic translation of this environmental destruction by the poetry platform Poets for Living Waters. Functioning as a communal expression of grief, of remembrance, and a demand for change, Poets for Living Waters brings together the work of hundreds of authors, figuratively raising oil’s toxic specter to the surface by challenging America’s failure to protect ocean ecosystems through an elementally-attentive poetics that highlights the characteristic traits of both water and oil and the deadly effects that occur when these two elements intermix.