ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY

“Ruge el bosque is more than an ecopoetry anthology: it is a sojourn of voices crying out, echoing through the rivers, the mountains, beneath the tree leaves, in the heart of the sky and the earth. Weaving together verses and creating worlds, these poets celebrate life, human and nonhuman resilience, while also condemning the neocolonial systems that try to silence the roaring of the forest. Ruge el bosque is a summoning, an antidote to inertia, and a return to hope.”

Rita M. Palacios. Co-author of Unwriting Maya Literature: T'síib as Recorded Knowledge.

“An anthology that insists on the power of words as a tool of survivance. By bringing together poems in Guna, Maya K’iche’, Náhuatl, Belizean Kriol, Garifuna, Ngäbere, Yucatec Maya, English, and Spanish, this book compiles different ways of understanding, naming, and caring for the world. The forest roars in many tongues once again, pointing out to a multitude of possible paths forward.”

Mariajosé Rodríguez Pliego. Specialist in Indigenous literatures and Assistant Professor at Northwestern University.

“The second volume of Ruge el bosque persuasively shows us that to speak about biodiversity is also to speak about linguistic and cultural diversity. Language emerges from dwelling, and dwelling takes place in language. Through linguistic habitation, the poets assembled here bring territory into view as a glimmering weave, co-created by human and nonhuman life.”

Carolyn Fornoff. Author of Subjective Aesthetics. Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change.

“Continuing a problematic articulated in the first volume of this now necessary series of ecopoetic anthologies, its editors ask: If the ecological crisis is planetary, why make a regional anthology? Once again, they insist, such work is needed because situated discourses are a countermeasure to the global infrastructure systems that exert unbearable pressure on planetary environmental systems. And language loss is loss of situated discourses. And poetry is the living form of the languages of so many worlds of the Americas. Within that earthly foundation, this anthology accommodates an astonishing rooted network of contemporary poets of the Americas, redefined here as Abiayala/Afro/Latin America as seen, in this volume, from those vantages of the contemporary commonly referred to as Mesoamerica. In thinking through the geopolitics of ecopoetics, the poetry collected in Ruge el Bosque is a reminder that the ancestors still speak and, through these poets, debate about what we call the world. Against what Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante has called the strange dissonance of “acoustic colonialism,” voices rise from these pages to fill the air with the framing and shaping claims of sounding breath.”

Edgar García. Author of Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis.