An etiology of metaphors: toxic discourse and poetic form in Andrea Brady’s Wildfire

Abstract

ABSTRACTAndrea Brady’s long poem Wildfire, begun in response to the second invasion of Iraq, explores the impact of the incendiary on living environments. In formally challenging ways, the poem expresses the reach of the military–industrial complex and its varied mediation in contemporary culture. Combining print and digital modes, Wildfire incorporates a vast range of resources and offers a long historical view on the ethics of warfare. Fundamental to this exploration are questions of scale, and how our distance from the effects of war – both in space and time – limits our understanding of its environmental impact. This essay argues that poetic experimentation is fundamentally a political act, one that uses the resources of language to create new readings of environmental threat for the twenty-first century.