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Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T Dungy
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T Dungy
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Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T Dungy
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
US SRP: $19.99 US
Binding: Paperback
Pub Date: May 07, 2024
Physical Info: 0.8" H x 8.2" L x 5.4" W (0.65 lbs) 352 pages
A "heartfelt and thoroughly enriching" (Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times bestselling author of World of Wonders) work that expands on how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.I
n Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.
In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.
"Brilliant and beautiful" (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights), Soil functions as the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the people of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.
Camille T. Dungy is the author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited three anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Book Award. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.
Review Quotes:
Soil is on one level a book about the rewards of gardening...On a deeper level it's about Black American resilience and roots. [ Soil] insist[s] on making the domestic visible and argue[s] that an ethics of care that we often associate with maternity--whether we are mothers or not--is crucial in combating issues as large as the climate crisis. [Dungy] emphasize[s] the collective over the individual, posing old questions in fresh and urgent ways: What is our responsibility to the next generation? What does it mean to mother through perilous times of uncertainty, struggle, trauma, and change; to mother against violence, discrimination, plunder, and greed? To write "mother" as verb?" -The New York Review
"Fans of Dungy's poetry will delight in her sparkling prose, and the wide-ranging meditations highlight the connections between land, freedom, and race. It's a lyrical and pensive take on what it means to put down roots." --Publishers Weekly"Instead of the conventional nature narrative, in which an individual--most often White and well-off--communes with nature, Dungy offers a more complex, nuanced story in which the experience of nature is vital but is also entangled with race, national and family history, motherhood, and more. The text is the literary equivalent of the garden Dungy gradually coaxed into being: lively, messy, beset by invasive weeds, colorful, constantly changing, never quite under control, and endlessly interconnected." --Kirkus Reviews
"In Soil, Dungy plants poems next to memoir next to critical analysis next to environmental history next to African American history, cultivating the radical ecological thought she wants to see more of in the world. This vibrant memoir challenges readers to look beyond the racial and scientific uniformness of most environmental literature and discover the rich wildness and hope that lies all around them." --BookPage
"Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home." --Harvard Book Store
"In Soil, Dungy draws a connection between diversifying the plant life in her garden and diversifying the canon of nature writing." --NPR
"A poignant portrait of life and its challenges, told through the beauty of nature." --Library Journal (starred review)
"This book isn't just a pastoral portrait of the American west. It's also a window into the care and awareness we bring to the spaces we call home." --LitHub
"In Soil, [Dungy] creates a lively space for all voices to sprout and become included in the solutions that can help build, rather than tear down, diverse communities, both human and non-human... In another testament to community, Dungy demonstrates the possibility of inspirational and informative environmental literature that calls for our family and loved ones in and throughout." --The Brooklyn Rail
"This is a smart, beautiful, wide-ranging book that will draw you in and change how you look at the world around you." --The Southern Bookseller Review
"In her new book, Soil, [Dungy] takes her trowel to the issues of justice, wilderness, brutality, and neighborliness, and the garden that blooms through her sentences is both captivating and sobering." --The Millions
"A heartfelt and thoroughly enchanting tribute to family and community. Dungy shows us how to tend a garden, and how to tend a full and fragrant life." --AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, NYT Bestselling Author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
