Poetry
poems from HUMAN/ NATURE
Contributor
Stephen RatcliffeStephen Ratcliffe?¢â??Ã?¨â??Ã?¢s latest books of poetry are Portraits & Repetition (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002) and SOUND/(system) (Green Integer, 2002). Recent poems have appeared in 1913, Chain, Denver Quarterly, P-QUEUE, New American Writing, LIT, Bombay Gin, Common Knowledge, War & Peace, Conjunctions and NO. Listening to Reading, a book of essays on sound/shape and meaning in ?¢â??Ã?¨?ìexperimental?¢â??Ã?¨? poetry, was published by SUNY Press in 2000. He has recently completed a 1,000 page book of poems called HUMAN / NATURE (1,000 poems written in 1,000 consecutive days). He lives in Bolinas, California where he surfs every day and publishes Avenue B books, and teaches at Mills College in Oakland.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Oneness: Nature & Connectivity in Chinese Art
By Hindley WangSEPT 2023 | ArtSeen
Curated by Hiromi Kinoshita and Gabrielle Niu, Oneness: Nature & Connectivity in Chinese Art features the work of four contemporary Chinese artists installed in conjunction with a selection of historical treasures from the museum’s collection.
Matthew Day Jackson: Against Nature
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightJUNE 2023 | ArtSeen
The Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, a book on the work of Albert Bierstadt, René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, and Roy Gallant’s Our Universe are arranged along the front desk of Pace. While these books index the aesthetics of Matthew Day Jackson’s exhibition, it is Huysmans’s Against Nature that inspired the show’s title, and its protagonist, the isolated collector of extravagance Des Esseintes, who acts as its aegis.
THREE POEMS
By Simon PettetSEPT 2023 | Poetry
Simon Pettet is a New York based poet, the author of Hearth and As A Bee. These short poems are from an upcoming collection.
from The Nature Book
By Tom ComittaMARCH 2023 | Fiction
Darwin discovered that evolution proceeds with neither direction nor purpose. The natural world is largely indifferent to plan or plot. Yet we, story-seeking creatures that we are, see the world around us as more completed, more accomplished, than what came before. Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book explores these tensions by stitching together hundreds of fragments in the history of literary writing about the natural world—this excerpt alone is a collage of ninety-seven novels ranging from Hawthorne to Arundhati Roy. Though the text of The Nature Book is a polyphonic effort of writers, humans are absent from the actual story. In this seamless anthology, we forget that the experience of reading about nature is mediated by human voices and, when suspended in the text, succumb to the magical illusion that we are perceiving the world in itself.
