Selfie

“A stunning range of psychic value not as doppelganger or estrangement, Selfie specifies poetic lingual experience in depth. These essays concentrate while operating at a higher plane of experience where the pulls and tensions of the poetic practitioner remain energetically magnified.”

–Will Alexander, US poet

“In this compelling, ambitious, vertiginous Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection, James Sherry does nothing less than offer operational guidelines for cooperative social adaptation to halt climate change through the aperture of the milieu he knows best: poetry.”

–Judith Goldman, Associate Professor, SUNY Buffalo

“Not, as the tag would have it, a “thought experiment,” Selfie is thought experience. It’s personal, and only a person can extract a selfie from the aggregate bruise. In this context, to say “well done” is both a recommendation and a rueful glimpse of the challenges keening in global warming.”

—Jed Rasula, Professor, University of Georgia

Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection presents the first general theory that links poetry in environmental thought to poetry as an environment. James Sherry accomplishes this task with a network model of connectivity that scales from the individual to social to environmental practices. Selfie demonstrates how parts of speech, metaphor, and syntax extend bidirectionally from the writer to the world and from the writer inward to identities that promote sustainable practices. Selfie shows how connections in the biosphere scale up from operating within the body, to social structures, to the networks that science has identified for all life. The book urges readers to construct plural identifications rather than essential claims of identity in support of environmental diversity.

James Sherry is the author of 14 books of poetry and prose, mostrecently The Oligarch: Rewriting Machiavelli’s The Prince for Our Time and the poetry book Entangled Bank. Since 1976, he has edited Roof Books, publishing more than 200 titles of seminal works of language writing, flarf, conceptual poetry, new narrative, and environmental poetry. He started The Segue Foundation in 1977, producing over 10,000 performance events in New York City.