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Trophic Cascade
Poems about birth, death, and ecosystems of nature and power
Winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry (2018)
In this fourth book in a series of award-winning survival narratives, Dungy writes positioned at a fulcrum, bringing a new life into the world even as her elders are passing on. In a time of massive environmental degradation, violence and abuse of power, a world in which we all must survive, these poems resonate within and beyond the scope of the human realms, delicately balancing between conflicting loci of attention. Dwelling between vibrancy and its opposite, Dungy writes in a single poem about a mother, a daughter, Smokin' Joe Frazier, brittle stars, giant boulders, and a dead blue whale. These poems are written in the face of despair to hold an impossible love and a commitment to hope. A readers companion will be availabe at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.
Winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry (2018)
In this fourth book in a series of award-winning survival narratives, Dungy writes positioned at a fulcrum, bringing a new life into the world even as her elders are passing on. In a time of massive environmental degradation, violence and abuse of power, a world in which we all must survive, these poems resonate within and beyond the scope of the human realms, delicately balancing between conflicting loci of attention. Dwelling between vibrancy and its opposite, Dungy writes in a single poem about a mother, a daughter, Smokin' Joe Frazier, brittle stars, giant boulders, and a dead blue whale. These poems are written in the face of despair to hold an impossible love and a commitment to hope. A readers companion will be availabe at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.
92 pages, Paperback
First published March 7, 2017
19 people are currently reading
415 people want to read
About the author
Camille T. Dungy
28 books313 followersCamille T. Dungy (born in Denver in 1972) is an American poet and professor.
She is author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and three poetry collections, including, Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) and Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010). Dungy is editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009), and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Callaloo, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Poetry Daily.
Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Cave Canem, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and she is recipient of the 2011 American Book Award, a 2010 California Book Award silver medal, a two-time recipient of the Northern California Book Award, and a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee. Dungy graduated from Stanford University and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she earned her MFA. Recently a professor in the Creative Department at San Francisco State University (2011-2013), she is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.
She is author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and three poetry collections, including, Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) and Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010). Dungy is editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009), and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Callaloo, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Poetry Daily.
Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Cave Canem, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and she is recipient of the 2011 American Book Award, a 2010 California Book Award silver medal, a two-time recipient of the Northern California Book Award, and a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee. Dungy graduated from Stanford University and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she earned her MFA. Recently a professor in the Creative Department at San Francisco State University (2011-2013), she is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
July 17, 2020
From the First, the Body Was Dirt
July 16, 2017
Quite liked some of the poems, but the rest went a little over my head.
September 6, 2020
060920: quarantine buddy read #18 with Keagan! i've been way too busy for reviews lately, but please let the fact that i've written 2 poems that i actually like in the last 2 days serve in lieu of one for now.
June 23, 2019
I finished this book, but I cannot take it out of my bag or move on from it.
https://www.kenyonreview.org/journal/...
https://www.kenyonreview.org/journal/...
January 19, 2021
I especially loved:
"Ars Poetica after William Carlos Williams" ("Who is to say I am not / the fortunate creator of my household?")
"Mother daughter Hour" ("The afternoon light is brighter here on the couch than any other place in the room")
"Characteristics of Life" ("Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances /between meadows of night-blooming flowers")
And I can't stop thinking about "Brevity"
"Ars Poetica after William Carlos Williams" ("Who is to say I am not / the fortunate creator of my household?")
"Mother daughter Hour" ("The afternoon light is brighter here on the couch than any other place in the room")
"Characteristics of Life" ("Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances /between meadows of night-blooming flowers")
And I can't stop thinking about "Brevity"
April 15, 2024
Camille Dungy is one of the best living poets to study if you are seeking more musicality in your verse. She is so in tune with the sounds of nature and allow them to guide her words. I am thoroughly impressed by the way she blends nature poetry with commentary on Black persistence and on the tension between motherhood and work. She is fond of a litany and a long sentence. Her invented repetition structures guide much of the framework of this book, as well as a throughline of "Frequently Asked Questions" poems.
June 22, 2017
Dungy wraps natural effects around the story of her family, particularly concerning birth and death. We're all the same, she insists. Bear, eagle, deer, vole. We run the course of our worlds protecting our babies, mourning our elders, adapting to new conditions, trying to reach stability, safety, harmony. It's a wonder how she spins the concept of a trophies cascade, where a change in habitat for one animal affects the lives of all animals within that ecosystem, into a fierce statement about motherhood, how it changes mother as well as child,
March 3, 2022
"Few things tie us together more than our need to dig up the right words to justify ourselves."
That's one of several lines in Camille T. Dungy's book of poetry, Trophic Cascade, that stopped me in my tracks. This short but powerful collection weaves together narratives of nature, motherhood, and racial injustice to ask big questions about what we're doing here and why we matter. I'm taking a class with the writer later this month and wanted to familiarize myself with her work beforehand, and I really loved it. Highly recommend.
That's one of several lines in Camille T. Dungy's book of poetry, Trophic Cascade, that stopped me in my tracks. This short but powerful collection weaves together narratives of nature, motherhood, and racial injustice to ask big questions about what we're doing here and why we matter. I'm taking a class with the writer later this month and wanted to familiarize myself with her work beforehand, and I really loved it. Highly recommend.
July 23, 2024
Read for class. The themes of this book are very relevant to me in the season of life, so I found them very endearing.
August 18, 2024
Two of my favorite poems of all time “trophic cascade” and “characteristics of life” are in this collection so of course I had to purchase and read the full thing. A very great eco/motherhood collection.
December 24, 2021
I loved a lot of poems in this book, which are personal and beautiful. Especially the way nature is integrated into the personal.
May 23, 2024
I've been familiar with the iconic title poem for a long time, of course. It's taught in nearly every workshop on Eco writing. Finally got tired of waiting for my boyfriend to move in with his library and bought my own copy.
I love the concept of pregnant/ new mother as ecotone. And while I was familiar with this idea of a mother's transformation into an entire new ecology by childbirth, as it's expressed in 'Trophic Cascade" as well, and well familiar with it from my own life, I love the way this was explored and developed throughout the entire collection.
A few excerpts, as I feel the poets always speak best in reviews:
It seems every one of them is silvered, dead/ until we learn to see the living--/ beaked males and females clutching/ their hundred thousand roe--/ working muscle, fin, and scale/ against the great laws of the universe--/ current, gravity, obsolescence, and the bears/ preparing for their torpor, clawing/ the water for weeks, this rich feed/ better than any garbage bin--and these still/ living red ones, who made it past all that,/ nuzzling toward a break in the current,/ everything about them moving, moving/ yet hardly moving forward at all.
[Okay that was a whole poem, phone doesn't do line breaks properly, so if you're not used to the convention, the / indicates one]
--Before the fetus proves viable,
A stroll creekside in the High Sierra [title]
After the reintroduction of gray wolves/ to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their culling/ of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt/ of the mid century. In their up reach/ songbirds nested, who scattered/ seed...
...and willows, growing/ now right down to the river, brought beavers,/! who dam. ... the river..../ ...thus dammed,/ compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don't/ you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this/ life born from one hungry animal.../ I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time/ a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.
-- from Trophic Cascade, the whole of which is available online, and which you should Google. Formatting matters, as does the complete argument, the full weight of the imagery, and the insertion of the human into the larger natural context, where we belong.
The new mother sleep, always, in their clothes/ since all their doors have been opened,/
since they learned every room is part of every other room./
Common as suburban deer, ...,/
..../
and winter coming on.
.......
Mouths to feed and flanks to warm.
Everything cleared out
And winter coming on.
-- From After Birth
I love the concept of pregnant/ new mother as ecotone. And while I was familiar with this idea of a mother's transformation into an entire new ecology by childbirth, as it's expressed in 'Trophic Cascade" as well, and well familiar with it from my own life, I love the way this was explored and developed throughout the entire collection.
A few excerpts, as I feel the poets always speak best in reviews:
It seems every one of them is silvered, dead/ until we learn to see the living--/ beaked males and females clutching/ their hundred thousand roe--/ working muscle, fin, and scale/ against the great laws of the universe--/ current, gravity, obsolescence, and the bears/ preparing for their torpor, clawing/ the water for weeks, this rich feed/ better than any garbage bin--and these still/ living red ones, who made it past all that,/ nuzzling toward a break in the current,/ everything about them moving, moving/ yet hardly moving forward at all.
[Okay that was a whole poem, phone doesn't do line breaks properly, so if you're not used to the convention, the / indicates one]
--Before the fetus proves viable,
A stroll creekside in the High Sierra [title]
After the reintroduction of gray wolves/ to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their culling/ of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt/ of the mid century. In their up reach/ songbirds nested, who scattered/ seed...
...and willows, growing/ now right down to the river, brought beavers,/! who dam. ... the river..../ ...thus dammed,/ compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don't/ you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this/ life born from one hungry animal.../ I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time/ a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.
-- from Trophic Cascade, the whole of which is available online, and which you should Google. Formatting matters, as does the complete argument, the full weight of the imagery, and the insertion of the human into the larger natural context, where we belong.
The new mother sleep, always, in their clothes/ since all their doors have been opened,/
since they learned every room is part of every other room./
Common as suburban deer, ...,/
..../
and winter coming on.
.......
Mouths to feed and flanks to warm.
Everything cleared out
And winter coming on.
-- From After Birth
August 25, 2020
“Perhaps I could fabricate an image to represent this // agony, but the steward has walked into the galley / of history. There is nothing figurative about us.” To read any book of poems is to engage in a practice of conversation; within that conversation is, hopefully, a mix of sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience. For me to read this magnificent collection is to be called to confront the issues and subjects that challenge me most fiercely—the impact of humanity on our environment, the subjugation and disempowerment of many, the contradictions of how to consider my (and my world’s) history and legacy while also attending to the matters of my day-to-day life, all alongside the beauty and wonder of life in its myriad forms. That I chose it haphazardly from my stack this morning, after another attempted murder of a Black man, Jacob Blake, by the police in this country, makes its truths stand even more starkly and call me even more fervently to be in the world in a way that these poems are.
April 19, 2021
I read this book for poetry month and to read a black eco-poets work. I liked the Field Trip poem and how much it illuminated modern agricultural practices. Frequently asked question #3 about her baby sleeping at night pretty much summed up a modern moms fears - forget her sleep, I can’t sleep myself when I’m alone at night wondering about her future in this changing world. Loved that. I also enjoyed Conspiracy, about raising a black baby girl in America.
Many of the other poems were hard for me to understand. I don’t know if that’s my ignorance and inexperience reading poetry or if the concepts really were too abstract.
Many of the other poems were hard for me to understand. I don’t know if that’s my ignorance and inexperience reading poetry or if the concepts really were too abstract.
Read
March 17, 2024I'm reading through Lithub's 365 Books to Start Your Climate Change Library, a reading list in four sections (Classics, Science, Fiction & Poetry, and Ideas). This book is #21 of Part 3: Fiction & Poetry and #55 overall.
This is a collection of poems with themes of motherhood & the environment, often with strong narrative elements that make the reading quick. I though they were fine.
This is a collection of poems with themes of motherhood & the environment, often with strong narrative elements that make the reading quick. I though they were fine.
October 19, 2020
very glad I re-read this today — just a gorgeous, intimate interweaving of motherhood/femininity/nature/humanity, the personal and the universal, into a collection of masterful storytelling and poignant poems
"There are these moments of permission / Between raindrops, / space, certainly, / but we call it *all* rain. / I hang in the intervals, / while Callie is sleeping, / my old self necessary / and imperceptible as air"
"There are these moments of permission / Between raindrops, / space, certainly, / but we call it *all* rain. / I hang in the intervals, / while Callie is sleeping, / my old self necessary / and imperceptible as air"
May 20, 2024
Motherhood and death: experiences you can't really communicate to someone who hasn't been there, but poets never stop trying.
These poems about motherhood, death, and love and grief for the world are really satisfying. I love the metaphor in "There are these moments of permission": comparing your old self, what was your whole self before motherhood, to the space between the drops of rain, "but we call it all rain."
These poems about motherhood, death, and love and grief for the world are really satisfying. I love the metaphor in "There are these moments of permission": comparing your old self, what was your whole self before motherhood, to the space between the drops of rain, "but we call it all rain."
July 16, 2019
While I can't relate to all of their poems, the book is still really good. I love her writing style, it's easy to read and reads very quickly. I don't know if I would personally get more of her books (I had to read this for a class), but it's really good if you want to read some nature/family poetry.
February 27, 2022
Although Camille Dungy, like Luci Shaw (one of my favorite poets), writes much about motherhood and the natural world, I found her poetry too raw and cryptic for my taste. (Also it makes a difference that Luci Shaw shares my faith.)
Some of the poems that I did like were "Trophic Cascade", "Mother Daughter Hour", and "How Great the Gardens When They Thrive".
Some of the poems that I did like were "Trophic Cascade", "Mother Daughter Hour", and "How Great the Gardens When They Thrive".
September 14, 2022
"Half the time I can't tell my experiences apart from the ghosts'."
Beautiful, almost gentle poems about life cycles, what it means to become a mother, what it means to face death, and how we (but in particular, women) relate to nature. Read for Ecopoetics and am interested in more of Dungy's work.
Beautiful, almost gentle poems about life cycles, what it means to become a mother, what it means to face death, and how we (but in particular, women) relate to nature. Read for Ecopoetics and am interested in more of Dungy's work.
May 2, 2023
Dungy’s poetry has a quality to it that makes me dearly miss home. It makes me want to hug my mother and my grandmother and my grandfather and my sister and our father. I think that her writing has a familiar quality that feels very much like comfort and safety and growing up. It feels kind of like realizing the world is not perfect but there can still be safe spaces and moments.
December 23, 2023
“I speak of underneathedness and the welcome of mosses, of life that springs up, little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.”
Really evocative imagery throughout this collection and a stunning story of birth, motherhood, and grief. One, unfortunately, that did not quite resonate with me the way I suspect it intended to resonate with others. A worthy story, nonetheless.
Really evocative imagery throughout this collection and a stunning story of birth, motherhood, and grief. One, unfortunately, that did not quite resonate with me the way I suspect it intended to resonate with others. A worthy story, nonetheless.
January 18, 2024
A mix of some of my favorite poems I have ever read. Moments of Permission being a standout yet also some of the weirdest and least enjoyable poems I’ve read. Because of the depth and love I have for the 3-4 fantastic poems in this collection I have to sing the books praise but as a package it is just pretty good.
March 6, 2024
I’m very glad I read these poems. These poems ranged across the front range of Colorado - to the poet’s home, to her garden, to her daughter’s bed, to her husband’s side, and also across vaster distances. I liked her poetry, her musicality, her wit, and her clarity. I bought this book new from Amazon last week.
February 17, 2020
There are a lot of gorgeous poems in the volume, but the title poem, "Trophic Cascade," and "How Great the Gardens when the Grow" will both stay with me for a long, long time.
Full disclosure: Camille Dungy is my colleague at Colorado State, and I'm glad to have brilliant colleagues like her.
Full disclosure: Camille Dungy is my colleague at Colorado State, and I'm glad to have brilliant colleagues like her.
January 16, 2021
Loved the answers to the questions, and the invitation to motherhood. Love the clear eye on it all (even the awful -- as in "Poor Translation"). Thank you, The Writer's Hotel, for leading me to this poet and her work!
October 13, 2021
Had to read Dungy for an eco-writing seminar and was surprised by how focused the piece was on her identity as a Black mother. I’m captivated by her poems, each one a different form and structure and incredibly personal. This was a quick but insightful and fulfilling read.
October 6, 2023
I loved this so much, from the poem that gives the collection its title to the series of poems that are FAQs with a new mother. You can read Trophic Cascade online here.
January 14, 2020
This is glorious.
July 10, 2020
Beautiful book full of poems on motherhood and blackness.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews