Judith Rauscher: Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry

In recent years, ecocriticism and mobility studies have increasingly intersected in efforts to examine how environmental degradation and patterns of human movement shape, and are shaped by, literary and cultural production. While traditional ecocritical approaches have often centered on stable notions of place and long-term human/nature relationships, contemporary scholarship recognizes that such frameworks can obscure the realities of displacement, migration, and colonial histories. Similarly, mobility studies – particularly those aligned with cultural and postcolonial critique – have begun to grapple with how migrant and diasporic experiences intersect not only with questions of identity and belonging, but also with environmental conditions and ecological imaginaries. These interdisciplinary shifts are particularly vital in a time marked by both accelerating ecological crises and intensifying forms of global mobility, prompting a need to rethink the narratives we tell about nature, nation(s), and movement.

At a time when climate change deniers are gaining power and anti-immigration policies are taking an unprecedentedly violent and lawless turn – reframing the idea of mobility to, from, and within the United States – Judith Rauscher’s Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry offers a timely and necessary intervention. Rauscher argues that poetry by migrant and diasporic writers offers alternative environmental imaginaries shaped by im/mobility, displacement, and colonial legacies. Rather than positioning nature as a static refuge, framing mobility solely through “the figure of the climate refugee” (12), or pursuing the romanticized ideal of rooted, place-based ecological subjectivity, Rauscher emphasizes the complexities of human-nature relationships forged under conditions of forced movement, ecological precarity, and cultural fragmentation. Rauscher theorizes “ecopoetic place-making” as a form of poetic engagement that constructs place through language, memory, and imagination, foregrounding the complexities of migration, mobility, and environmental injustice. In doing so, she explores how these poets reimagine place as both materially and affectively constituted, always shaped by histories of violence and practices of resistance. The works of poets Rauscher examines in this book – Craig Santos Perez, Juliana Spahr, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, and Etel Adnan – challenge the exclusionary narratives of environmental belonging often embedded in ecolocalist discourses, and instead propose more just and multi-scalar ways of relating to place and planet.

The chapters unfold through a dual theoretical lens that treats ecopoetry as migratory and migration poetry as ecological. By structuring the book in such a dialectic rhythm, Rauscher begins her book with ecopoetry as a mode of migration and concludes with migration poetry as a form of ecological thinking. In this sense, the text moves through five poet-centered chapters, beginning with an analysis of Perez’s Guåhan-rooted ecopoetics, where environmental consciousness emerges through CHamoru cultural memory and anti-imperial critique. The trajectory continues through Spahr’s unsettling meditations on settler colonialism and ecological entanglement in Hawai‘i, building toward the central pivot of the book, Derek Walcott’s transoceanic poetics, which bridges the conceptual shift from ecopoetry as poetry of migration to migration poetry as ecopoetic. The final two chapters explore Ali’s diasporic longing rendered through arid landscapes and Adnan’s planetary poetics of war, displacement, and environmental collapse. Across these chapters, the book delineates a poetics that resists static conceptions of place, offering instead (eco)poetics of migration that unsettle the binaries of rootedness and movement, home and exile. In tracing how ecological and migratory consciousness co-constitute one another, the book gestures towards an emergent form of poetic world-making – one attuned to the dislocations of empire and climate while imagining modes of belonging beyond the bounds of the nation-state and the enclosure of self.

In chapter one, Rauscher examines how the first four volumes of Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing poetry series, from unincorporated territory, articulate what she calls a participatory ecopoetics rooted in CHamoru cultural knowledge, environmental pedagogy, and decolonial resistance. Framing Perez’s poetry as a project of place-making under conditions of im/mobility, the chapter shows how his work seeks to educate readers about the ecological devastation and cultural precarity caused by U.S. military occupation and colonialism in Guåhan. Through documentary modes, multilingual experimentation, and fragmented poetic forms, Rauscher argues, Perez not only articulates CHamoru identity as both place-based and mobile, but also foregrounds Indigenous modes of environmental understanding and transmission in the face of displacement and erasure. The chapter highlights how Perez’s poems link endangered ecologies to histories of CHamoru immobilization and migration, portraying poetic practice itself as a continuation of ancestral traditions like oceanic navigation. Ultimately Rauscher argues that Perez’s poetry enacts a decolonial environmental pedagogy which requires readers – CHamoru and non-CHamoru alike – to assume responsibility in processes of cultural and ecological restoration by actively engaging with the poems’ layered references, critical demands, and affective resonances.

The second chapter turns to select poems by Juliana Spahr, “a poet of collectivity and entanglement” (Rauscher 88), and her para-lyrical ecopoetry, which is in part political lyric, “investigative,” “located” or documentary. Spahr’s poetry, Rauscher observes, is a nuanced exploration of the contradictions and limitations inherent in settler ecological agency under conditions shaped by U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, and environmental crisis. Drawing on a range of poems across Spahr’s oeuvre, she shows how Spahr’s para-lyrical experimentation probes the multiscalar mobilities – of toxins, species, capital, and people – that structure human-nature relations and unsettle notions of emplacement and ecological responsibility. Spahr’s poetry, Rauscher argues, foregrounds the entanglement of bodies, ecosystems, and social hierarchies through Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, which enables Spahr’s portrayal of bodies as “literal contact zones” (qtd. in Rauscher 2) enmeshed with chemical, ecological, and political systems. Rather than presenting ecological attachment as inherently redemptive, however, Spahr foregrounds the embodied contradictions of being an Anthropocene subject – one whose participation in systems of harm cannot be easily undone. Rauscher’s framing of Spahr’s poetics can be seen as a gesture toward what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism – an attachment to hopes or possibilities that are ultimately unachievable, illusory, or potentially harmful when realized. In her analysis of Spahr’s “Gentle Now,” Rauscher highlights the ways in which Spahr depicts in her poems how labor-workers are forced to participate, cruelly, in the production of the very substances that harm them and their environments in multitudinous ways. Spahr’s depiction of settler desire for ecological embeddedness – especially in Hawai‘i – also reveals how such attachments, even when motivated by care or learning, risk reproducing structures of harm. The longing for place-based intimacy thus becomes inherently problematic, illustrating how deeply embedded forms of settler attachment may compromise, rather than enhance, ecological and ethical well-being. The chapter ultimately contends that Spahr’s ecopoetics resists easy solutions by staging the difficulty of cultivating ethical relationships to place from a position of privilege. Instead, her ecopoetics prompts us to ask what it means for mobile subjects to remain accountable in the face of entanglement, and whether settler ecological agency might be reimagined through practices of restraint, reflexivity, and withdrawal.

Marking a pivot, chapter three examines Derek Walcott’s Omeros to explore what Rauscher describes as a “lyricized planetary epic” (129) – a complex ecopoetic project that entangles the personal, political, and environmental implications of mobility and poetic place-making. Drawing attention to the underexamined “U.S. passages of Omeros” (132), as opposed to the Caribbean ones, the chapter reveals how Walcott’s narrator – “a Black postcolonial subject [and] a relatively privileged transnational migrant of color” (136) – grapples with the ethics and the limits of (eco)poetic witnessing as he moves between the Caribbean and the U.S. landscapes shaped by histories of colonization, chattel slavery, and genocide. Central to Rauscher’s argument is that Walcott’s use of genre-mixing – blending epic, travelogue, pastoral, elegy, and confessional lyric – enables an interrogation of how migration both complicates and enriches environmental sensibility. In this careful reading of the long poem, Walcott’s engagements with U.S. landscapes, especially in the South and the Dakotas, lead to a recalibration of ecological and historical perception, one that acknowledges settler-colonial violence and the narrator Derek’s own complicity in extractive systems. Through ironic self-reflexivity and troubled lyrical expression, Omeros stages a transnational and environmentally attuned sense of place, gesturing toward the planetary rather than the merely global. Ultimately, Rauscher argues, Walcott’s ecopoetics of mobility does not resolve the tension between witnessing and complicity, presence and distance, but rather holds space for them, prompting his readers to reflect on the ethical stakes of poetic place-making in a world shaped by asymmetries of mobility and ecological crises.

Following Walcott’s planetary lyric, Chapter Four turns to Agha Shahid Ali’s A Nostalgist’s Map of America to explore how ecological longing and poetic place-making take shape under conditions of displacement and exclusion. Rather than framing nature as a neutral space of solace, the chapter argues that Ali’s poems reflect a “diasporic intimacy,” a notion Rauscher borrows from Svetlana Boym, with the more-than-human world forged in response to the migrant subject’s precarious belonging in the human communities in the United States. Ali’s ecopoetics draws from reflective nostalgia, which “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity” (Boym qtd. in Rauscher 179), rather than memory or rootedness (as an alternative to this, Rauscher proposes “routedness” [180]). In so doing, he further foregrounds the affective and ethical tensions of mobile place-attachment, where intimacy with place often arises not from access or permanence but from alienation. The chapter situates this dynamic within a broader critique of ecological citizenship, showing how Ali’s speaker, Shahid, engages with American landscapes through literary and artistic interlocutors while remaining sensitive to his position as an arrivant within a settler-colonial context. In doing so, the poetry opens up possibilities for more inclusive environmental imaginaries that affirm the legitimacy of migrant attachment while remaining attentive to the histories of dispossession that shape the lands they inhabit. Ultimately, Rauscher posits, Ali’s work suggests that the yearning for ecological belonging stems not only from an affinity with the natural world, but also from exclusion from human communities – where the experience of displacement or racism renders nature a rare site for intimacy and recognition.

Building on the diasporic ecological intimacy explored in Ali’s poetry, the fifth and final chapter turns to Etel Adnan to examine how a poetics of post-mobility reshapes human-nature relations through a queer ecological lens. Rauscher traces how Adnan’s speaker(s) moves not toward re-emplacement, but toward an open-ended process of ecological reorientation. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology, and then specifically “migrant orientation” – “the lived experience of facing at least two directions, toward a home that has been lost, and to a place that is not yet home” (Ahmed qtd. in Rauscher 215) – the chapter shows how Adnan’s poetry stays with the disorientation caused by displacement, while transforming it into a persistent, sensual attentiveness to the more-than-human world. Birds, trees, mountains, sea, fog, and the ocean become recurring objects of orientation in these poems, shaping an eco-erotic sensibility that privileges emotional and perceptual intimacy with the more-than-human world over direct bodily presence or sustained physical nearness to it. Adnan’s nature poems thus offer not the comfort of rootedness, but the radical and queer promise of reorientation.

In closing, Ecopoetic Place-Making offers a compelling argument for reading contemporary American poetry at the intersection of ecocriticism and mobility studies, showing how (eco)poetries of migration contribute to rethinking environmental belonging in a world marked by uneven im/mobilities. Across five chapters, Rauscher proposes a powerful conceptual trajectory – Indigenous resistance and survival (Perez), located settler self-implication (Spahr), planetary transnational critique (Walcott), translocal diasporic longing (Ali), and, finally, queer ecological desire and futurity (Adnan). This trajectory captures the varied orientations through which these poets imagine relationships to land, history, and the more-than-human world. These concepts become not just descriptors of poetic worldviews, but building blocks of a broader ecoethical framework that resists eco-nativist exclusions and foregrounds the role of art in envisioning more inclusive environmental futures. As the book’s conclusion emphasizes, contemporary ecopoetries of migration offer layered, historically saturated, and affectively charged imaginaries of place-making, which allow us to see places as always-already transversed by histories of violence and movement, and poetry as a critical guide for navigating this terrain. In a time of escalating ecological and displacement crises, across the world but especially in the United States, Rauscher’s book opens up a much-needed dialogue: it reminds us that how we imagine nature and mobility through literature shapes how we live with – and care for – our shared and contested worlds. In other words, what Rauscher gently reveals is that to make place is to make home – an act rooted in our attunement to and emergence from the ecologies around us – and invites us to join these poetic re-orientations.