ABSTRACT
Working with notions of conceptual and ontological “entanglement” and Eduard Glissant’s “poetics of relation,” this essay explores examples of ecopoetics that engage with rivers as both site and method. The rivers at the heart of poems by Cecily Nicholson (From the Poplars), Layli Long Soldier (“38”), Fred Wah and Rita Wong (beholden), and Jordan Abel (NISHGA), are sites of colonial invasion, occupation, and continuing resource extraction; they are dammed, damaged, and dispossessed rivers that the poets attend to with decolonial compassion and poetic remediation. In doing so, these poets find in the mobile “bodies of water” that rivers form an alternative ontology: one that is thoroughly relational and necessarily entangled, marking the human and more-than-human as intra-related aspects of what Astrida Neimanis calls “a more-than-human hydrocommons.” The path of this essay’s exploration is, in turn, purposefully “errant,” taking to heart Glissant’s notion “errantry,” where instead of “argument” the essay pursues “the thought of what is relative.”
