Sealey Challenge Day 6: Habitat Threshold

Expect Suckerpunches

Craig Santos Perez has authored six books; I chose Habitat Threshold simply because it came up in my search for ecopoetry—and it did not disappoint! I love the way he uses a variety of strategies: “recycled” poems by Neruda, Stevens, Ginsberg, and other famous authors; visual graphs of climate change indicators, poetry graphs, and created forms like “Nuclear Family,” which is composed of 7 sections of creation verses counting down to zero, mimicking the destruction of the earth.

These are poems that don’t hold back their biting tone; we’re all implicated in the consumer culture that turns the wheel of our destruction. They’re poems I wish I had more time to explicate. (As I write at my kitchen table next to the dinner dishes, I keep hearing fizzing sounds from my seven-year-old doing “science” behind me. Naturally, I’m distracted. This is my life. I show up with my attempts and tell myself to stop expecting perfection.) A representative excerpt from “Thanksgiving in the Plantationocene”:

Thank you, dear readers, for joining me
at the table of this poem. Please join hands,

bow your heads, and repeat after me:
“Let us bless the hands that harvest and butcher

our food, bless the hands that drive delivery trucks
and stock grocery shelves, bless the hands that cooked

and paid for this meal, bless the hands that bind
our hands and force feed our endless mouth.

May we forgive each other and be forgiven.”

But today, I drafted (and agonized and second-guessed) a poem about the sea turtles on the Georgia coast drawn inland to the lights at the new Buc-ee’s in Brunswick. Tomorrow I’ll spend my time revising it.

I consider that time well spent.