ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the two poetry collections Linda Hogan brought out in the 2010s—“Dark. Sweet,” published as a section in a retrospective volume also entitled Dark. Sweet, and A History of Kindness—foreground mercy, kindness, and compassion as marks of genuine humanity and coordinates of normative interspecies ethics. There is much darkness and sorrow in this decade, too, as the poet mourns the nonhuman victims of anthropogenic environmental disasters, the genocide of American bison, and many other victims of the “human.” She also offers intimate glimpses of the interspecies community she has established with her animal companions, a community sealed by bonds of love, care, respect, and gratitude.
