Spiral Orb Eleven
With work by Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Alyse Bensel, Melissa Buckheit, Jefferson Carter, Matthew Cooperman, Patrick Jones, Jeffrey Jullich, Stacy Kidd, Rico Moore, Ellen Noonan, Dan Raphael, Jessica Reed, Chris Turnbull, and an entry poem composted from fragments of each of the pieces in the issue, Spiral Orb Eleven is here.
The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide Available for Pre-Order
The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide is now available for pre-order here.
“It’s a book to walk with, a book to scribble in, and even a book to use as a cushion if the desert rock you tried 
to sit on was too sharp. It’s also a book to get away with. Let the rest of the country rant and rave and post and tweet and babble. The writers inside these pages aren’t listening. They are too busy getting out there and getting lost, naming plants and animals, teaching and learning, and doing the vital work of mapping their place.” —David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West
“A book of delights for the mind and spirit, this is what a field guide ought to be. What better way to truly see a place than through the unblinking eyes of literature? What better way to truly love a place than through the embrace of ecology? Put them together, as Magrane and Cokinos have brilliantly done, and here is their irresistible invitation to the spectacular desert.” —Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature
Portfolio from Tumamoc Hill In Journal of the Southwest
The current issue of the Journal of the Southwest, a special issue of the Next Generation of Sonoran Desert Researchers, includes a portfolio of art and poetry from Tumamoc Hill.
Mirocha, P., Magrane, E., Terkanian, B., Milstead, M., Koopman, K., Coleman, D., Wakamatsu, M., Soria, M. (2015). The Tumamoc Hill Arts Initiative: A Portfolio of Site-based Art and Poetry Inspired by a History of Sonoran Desert Science. Journal of the Southwest, 57 (2-3), 265-303.
Situating Geopoetics
My article “Situating Geopoetics” is in the Association of American Geographers’ new journal GeoHumanities. Download the pdf here.
Here’s the abstract:
The form of the ars poetica is one in which the poet makes a statement on the art of poetry. Consider this a kind of ars-geo-poetica, a groundsetting for and statement on geopoetics that intends to both situate and to break open the field. This is an invitation for geopoetic texts and practices that draw on the work of poets as well as geographers, for an enchanted, earthy, and transaesthetic approach that moves to juxtapose contemporary poetics, particularly in the realm of ecopoetics, with critical human geography. Looking to geographers, poets, literary scholars, and poems themselves, this article aims to help situate and historicize geopoetics, provide a brief inventory of the current field, and carve out sites for future work.
Key Words: creative geographies, ecopoetics, geohumanities, geopoetics, site-based poetics.