Tread Upon
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Tread Upon—by turns tender and furious, and wholly original—attempts to depict the various scales upon which climate change unfolds around us.
Bold, incisive, and wholly original, Christopher Kondrich's Tread Upon explores the social, political, religious, and economic drivers behind the chronic devaluation of the living world. In this book-length sequence, in which each section unravels a word or phrase of the prefatory poem, Tread Upon sprawls from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich juxtaposes the intimate with the epic, integrating climate research and reporting to dismantle narratives of anthropocentrism and our individual responsibility amid corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? In this world where “even one blade is a place," the sequence reveals that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The probing third offering from Kondrich (Contrapuntal) speculates and ruminates on the state of the natural world: "If neither side of a blade of grass faces you/ and both sides are its back,/ does it hear the wind coming,/ does it know it is about to be tread upon/ without warning, without a trial." He effectively ascribes sensibility to grass and all species, shifting from the human-centric approach to nature to posit "there might also/ be another kind of grief, loss, memory... as valid a hunger as own." Questions press the same truth—that human beings are destroying the world, of which they are only one part—in different contexts: "Little whir of the laptop to keep it/ from overheating. Little wind from the lid// of the trash can falling shut. I tossed in the receipt, a little crumpled slip// of thermal paper that cannot be recycled/ because it contains a chemical/ that disrupts brain development, hormone production." The poet's voice, insistent and unsettled yet eerily subdued, seems to pick up on the anxious soundtrack of the zeitgeist. The result is an intelligent and often surprising record of contemporary troubles.
