Camille T. Dungy

Wesleyan University Press, March 2017

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.
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Praise for Trophic Cascade

Earthly and visionary, a soulful reckoning for our twenty-first century, held in focus through echoes of the past and future, but always firmly rooted in now. Each poem is a bridge in the music of a language that we believe and trust, that heals.
-Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Pleasure Dome

This is the work of a feminist whose voice is confident, authoritative―it is a book that does not wonder about or meditate on so much as sing, declare, witness, order, elegize. Dungy’s poems manifest an uneasy self-perception, but―or I should say, and―their source is strength and love. The combination makes Trophic Cascade urgent and necessary.
-Joy Katz, author of All You Do Is Perceive

Nature, motherhood, and racial violence intersect in Trophic Cascade, Camille T. Dungy‘s fourth poetry collection. Dungy… demonstrates her mastery of synthesis: fact, observation, and revelation mingle in perfect proportions. Trophic Cascade frequently bears witness—to violence, to loss, to environmental degradation—but for Dungy, witnessing entails hope.
—Harvard Review

Available in print and e-book