ABSTRACT
In the 1980s Linda Hogan published three collections of poems: Eclipse (1983), Seeing through the Sun (1985), and Savings (1988). Sensitive registers of the decade's growing ecofeminist attitudes, these poems mature towards a position Val Plumwood called ecological animalism. Focusing on the intersecting oppressions of colonialism/capitalism, speciesism, and sexism, Hogan becomes an important voice for the voiceless, an outspoken critic of modernity's intertwined structural violences. In the pages of her poetry such animal opportunists and trickster figures as crow and coyote become teachers of decolonial resistance and embodiments of humanimal survivance. In the modern/colonial context reclaiming the bond with nonhuman animals is an act of resurgence, a dismantling of “illegal borders,” and an inscription of the human within the world of universal foodiness, a world which is and has always been irredeemably kin-centric. In a patriarchal culture woman and animal become natural allies in anti-colonial resurgence: the struggle to depose the “human” and restore the ancient culture of the gift. Additionally, the three poetry collections published in the 1980s start to inquire into the ontological mystery of human destructiveness, which will come to be an obsessive motif in Hogan's most mature writings.
