Guidelines
- Book reviews should be between 800 and 1,000 words. Longer reviews of up to 2,000 words are acceptable if they engage substantially with the work under review. Please discuss this with the reviews editor.
- Reviews should be formatted simply, without special headings, in Times New Roman 12pt font with 1.5 spacing.
- Please give pages numbers for all quotations from the book under review. Quotations should be given as they appear in the book. Only use italics if they are used in the book itself.
- Please supply references for all other books and articles to which you refer in your review in MLA citation style.
- Reviews should err on the side of generosity to the author, but should not be hagiographic or read as a publisher’s blurb. Well-supported, constructive criticism in a formal or academic writing style, that focuses on craft and poetics is welcome.
- Send reviews as docx, doc or rtf files by email to the reviews editor:
info.plumwoodmountain@gmail.com - Please allow time for the Plumwood Mountain Journal team to respond to your submission and for the editorial process to proceed.
The following is a short note on some ideas you may wish to keep in mind when reviewing books for Plumwood Mountain Journal, as a journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.
Even if the work you are reviewing is not in your opinion ecopoetry, ecopoetic principles can be brought to your review of the work.
Ecopoetry is more than “landscape poetry” or “nature writing”. In the making (poiesis) that is poetry, ecopoetry engages with ecological perspectives, questions such as what it means to be human in a more-than-human world, how we might attend to the other than human in our writing and reading, what it might mean to write the other or to write with the other.
Ecopoetics reads, interprets or critiques poetic (and sometimes other literary and artistic) works from an ecological perspective, asking questions such as:
- how is the making of the work continuous with the poietic (making) or autopoietic activities of other than human species (e.g. nest building)?
- how does the work contribute to the making of a dwelling (or place) in which humans are ecologically embedded in a world?
- how does the work express the limits of language to convey what Tim Norton describes as “the ecological thought”?
- how does the work express the desire for human oneness with a more-than-human world? how does the work call this desire into question and reveal its colonising potential? how does the work seek harmony? or unsettle the relationship between humans and their habitat?
- how does the work relate to ecological activism?
- how does the work engage with or further an ecocentric rather than and anthropocentric perspective?
Works reviewed from an ecopoetic perspective need not themselves be examples of ecopoetry or ecoart.
The “how” part of the above questions can refer to imagery, form, voice, technique and so on. Forrest Gander writes: “What we’ve perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet’s means and material. But can poetry be ecological? Can it display or be invested with values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between human and nonhuman realms? Aside from issues of theme and reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of a poem on the page express an ecological ethics?” (Forrest Gander and John Kinsella, Redstart: An Ecological Poetics. Contemporary North American Poetry Series. Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2012, pp. 1-2).
13 December 2013 (updated 16 February 2016, 6 September 2018 and 18 March 2021)
Note: many of the ideas in this outline are gleaned from Kate Rigby’s encyclopaedia entry on “Ecopoetics”.