Cover Art: Barn Owl by Martin Bridge
From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Poets Write the Northeast
Edited by Samaa Abdurraqib
About From Root to Seed…….
From Root to Seed lifts up the poetic voices of Black, Brown, and Indigenous writers who have deep historical and current connections to the land, places, and the natural world of the Northeastern region of the United States. The 25 contemporary writers featured in this collection share poetry that engages with nature and land from a wide variety of vantage points, from the grand scale – imagining Sarah Baartman dreaming of boats and oceans – to the minute – an instruction on how to live like a snail. With its mix of emerging and well-established writers, From Root to Seed inserts critical voices into the stream of nature poetry coming out of the Northeast. This brief, but poignant collection serves as reminder that Black, Brown, and Indigenous people have deep roots in this region and continue to thrive here.
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Praise for From Root to Seed:
From Root to Seed could be the most important book you ever read. It is more than a book of poems; it is a collection of brilliant voices, a community of visionaries brought together to teach us that our purpose on this planet, which we have deeply harmed, may be the very thing that restores it. These songs of praise, written as poems or prose by those whose ancestors and souls have deep relationship with the place and beings in the northeast, are the attention, love, and celebration that a neglected planet needs. From Root to Seed reminds us that the most important thing we can plant may be words, for words become seeds of hope, which, with love and attention, become actions, and those actions, like the medicine in these words, have the power to heal. Let this book mentor you, let it inspire you, and hold it as proof that we, the human beings capable of destruction, are also capable of incredible beauty.
— CMarie Fuhrman, co-editor Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, Director of Poetry at Western Colorado University's Graduate Program in Creative Writing.
I am so pleased to have had a chance to spend time with the poems gathered in From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Poets Write the Northeast. What a rich variety of voices! The book makes "a place for our bodies in these surroundings," offering a rich assortment of forms, experiences, and perspectives. This anthology offers contemporary poetry that makes the literary world a better, brighter, and more open space.
—Camille T. Dungy, author of SOIL: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
In one of the poems in this book, Dr. Samaa Abdurraqib describes the place where the ocean meets the forest as a congregation and the trees' existence as spirit-work. This book is where the ocean meets the forest. It's spirit-work. It's a calling and it's an answer. It's a reminder that communities of color are as intertwined with nature as to be one with her. You will find a forest of beauty, joy, struggle, silence, and wonder in each and every poem.
—Kim M. Bailey, President & CEO, Justice Outside
From Root to Seed is an anthology of resistance--ecopoetry that centers the lyrics of Indigenous, Black, and Brown poets is expanding our canon for who is known to speak about, and on the behalf of, earth. The collection is a shift in culture and perspective. These poems show the interrelationships between natural, spiritual, and manmade ecosystems and the many parallels between the devastation of our environment to the suffering of racialized bodies in the United States. However, it is not a collection of poetry by IBPOC, if there is no poetry about resilience and gratitude and celebration for the water, land, and sky that has gotten us here and continues to get us through.
—Arisa White, Author of Who’s Your Daddy
There is almost no other aspect of human existence more important than space. Where we find ourselves is how we find ourselves. These poems interrogate the balance between the spaces we claim and the spaces that claim us, with a glorious range of grit and finesse; with care and reckless abandon. Every poem in here is either a life saver or a saved life.
----Scott Woods, Author of Urban Contemporary History Month