Soil
The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
In 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Mother Nature has a thing or two to tell us about human nature in poet Camille T. Dungy’s revelatory memoir of race and environmentalism. In 2013, Dungy moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, with her husband and young daughter, where she found herself rebelling against the strict gardening standards overzealously enforced by the homeowners’ association in her mostly white neighborhood. As she embarks on a journey toward freedom and color in her own backyard, Dungy explores how the process of diversifying the plant life in her garden made her think long and hard about liberation. We loved Dungy’s poetic flow as she shares stories from her own life and offers up insightful ideas about art, the environment, and the concept of ownership. By digging into the dirt, Dungy brings up some very deep truths about the role of homogeny in American culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this meditative outing, poet Dungy (Guidebook to Relative Strangers) reflects on race and history while discussing the garden she maintains outside her Colorado home. "No matter how many years have passed, no perennial in life's garden roots more deeply than history," she contends, using her garden as a metaphor to explore the complex historical relationship between Black Americans and the land. She tells of moving in 2013 with her husband and young daughter, Callie, to a majority-white neighborhood in Fort Collins, Colo., where she started a plot of flowers and vegetables in her yard. Gardening, she writes, helps her "feel rooted," and she recounts taking pains to explain to Callie the difference between their choosing to garden and the labor of enslaved people forced to work the land. Poems inspired by nature appear throughout, serving as connective tissue for ruminations on the garden of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, 19th-century naturalist John Muir's racism and sexism, and the overlap between environmental and racial justice. 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. Photos.
