Scientific Lyricism and the Entangled Subject in Contemporary Ecopoetics

Abstract

This chapter examines a science-inflected lyrical ecopoetics, a scientific lyricism, that foregrounds the situated experiences of an embodied subject coexisting with more-than-human ecological agents. This form of lyricism is an investigative ecopoetics into the internal and external world and directs ecological awareness into speculative visions for more-than-human affinities and more-than-human environments. This chapter argues that writers such as Adam Dickinson, Evelyn Reilly, Amanda Ackerman, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs reanimate the lyric into an interpretative modality that de-exceptionalizes rational scientific inquiry as the universal source of truth. Instead, scientific lyricism cultivates emergent kinships, encounters, trans-species exchanges, and transhistorical subjects as alternative vectors for interpreting troubled ecologies.