“Geographies of Justice”

I am so proud to have work in this remarkable issue of About Place Journal, a publication of The Black Earth Institute, a progressive think-tank devoted to the intersection of social justice, environmentalism, and spirituality. This issue, “Geographies of Justice” is edited by Alexis Lathem, along with Charles Coe and Richard Cambridge. In her Editor’s Introduction, Lathem writes, “We are each of us, as citizens, as artists, living in a time when we are being held to account, and this deep reckoning, this confrontation of the self-in-world, finds its most profound expression in the arts, and in these pages: the witness, the necessary grieving, the deep empathetic listening, the demand to be heard by those for whom reality was never in the background. This awakening of public consciousness would not be possible without the hard work of artists and poets, truth-tellers who have long been excavating the buried historic traumas, exposing the fault lines; who are doing the work of grieving for a dying Earth, and seeding a new culture in the turbulence of a changing planet. For without the work of a cultural imagination we cannot imagine change.”

My contribution to this glorious treasury is a poetic sequence of 12 poems titled “Mundus et Infans,” a work of dissent and outrage at the atrocities inflicted on the world’s children.

I have never been prouder to be a part of anything. This is a document for our time, a document for the ages.