“Published under the suggestive title Ruge el bosque, this anthology puts forth “ecopoetry” as a concept. While relatively new as a concept, ecopoetry has been building momentum for some time now, in work by authors from a variety of latitudes. Taking this perspective, editors Valeria Meiller, Whitney DeVos and Javiera Pérez Salerno have brought together a group of voices that, in pointing out regional particularities, find a point of intersection in the current climate crisis that so profoundly affects and troubles contemporary sensibilities. In their own way, these voices delineate a kind of sentient cartography of the ecological diversity found in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, as well as in some of the region’s border areas. That such a cartography weaves together the linguistic-cultural echoes of these places is one of the anthology’s most noteworthy aspects. Reclaiming cultural roots and concepts such as “teko porä” (Guarani), and returning us respectfully to that true north–the essential values of human life–in these poems “the forest roars” at a timely moment, genuinely shaking things up.”
Susy Delgado, author of Ybytu yma
“Profoundly significant, a landmark anthology that seeks answers to our era’s most decisive questions in Latin American ecopoetry: as exploration, prophecy, geology, breath. With a profound sensibility toward the materiality and history of the regions and biomes of the Southern Cone, the diversity of contemporary poetic voices gathered in this unique compilation examine how the landscape has been transformed, interrogate the language of ecological crisis, and highlight Indigenous languages and worldviews at a time marked by waste, pollution, and extinction. From vanishing wetlands, to polluted rivers and toxic atmospheres, these poetic voices are more than a requiem for what’s lost: as light flickers in the darkness, they illuminate means of intimate resistance and possible refuge grounded in poetry’s many ways of breathing and being in the world.”
Azucena Castro, author of Ecologías extrañas: Lecturas postnaturales de poemas extensos latinoamericanos del siglo XXI
“The forest roared and the voices of the earth answered the call. This anthology offers us a collection of evocative, combative and visionary ecopoems with which to rename territorial wounds and rethink our manner of walking upon the earth.”
Sofía Rosa, editor of the Latin American Platform of Environmental Humanities
"A vital project, Ruge el bosque is
an innovative and singular effort to compile a wide variety of voices
from the Southern Cone, filtered through an ecopoetic perspective. In
the face of ecological crisis, the poetry gathered here invokes acts of
resistance, assemblies with the non-human, and alternative
epistemologies in order to reinstate a latent order and restore a sense
of making the world: one that perhaps, until recently, lay forgotten."
Gisela Heffes, author of Políticas de la destrucción/Poéticas de la preservación: Apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América Latina
