Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower

Abstract

If one of the tasks of ecopoetics is to expand our imaginative capacities and prepare us to face ecological crises with resilience and creativity, then Sarah Lindsay's fourth collection of poems, Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower, does that. Assuming the forms of multiple personae, including the proverbial eccentric aunt, an octopus, and even the origin of life, the cell itself, Lindsay articulates the magnitude of our debt to the creatures and evolutionary processes that have made possible human existence. As an ode to the inextricable mesh of relations among beings, this collection resists granting authority to a human perspective and instead plays with shifting and various vantages that embody its biocentric principle. In other words, in Lindsay's poetic universe, there is not one lived reality, but many. An “other”-oriented text, Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower is a corrective to what William Rueckert has referred to as “man's tragic flaw . . . his anthropocentric . . . vision . . . his compulsion to conquer, humanize, domesticate, violate, and exploit every natural thing” (“Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism”). In its opposition to human exceptionalism and its endorsement of a diverse, multispecies community, Lindsay's work is an important contribution to a growing body of ecopoetry that recognizes in our precarity of knowledge and environment the conditions that connect us.