Eco-Relations: Our Circuitry Sews Us, Word by Word

Susan McCabe explores ecopoetic resonances between Brenda Hillman’s “Three Talks,” Brandon Som’s “Tripas,” and Donald Revell’s “Canandaigua.”

By Susan McCabeApril 13, 2025

• Poetry

• Environment

BRENDA HILLMAN’S THREE TALKS: Metaphor and Metonymy, Meaning and Mystery, Magic and Morality (2024), Brandon Som’s Tripas (2023), and Donald Revell’s Canandaigua (2024) are part of an energy field, stained by our times. Diverse as these poets are, they seem to mind-read one another, thinking and feeling through a large cultural scenario of overlapping lenses—the exiled, the lost, the remembered and cherished, the debris of history, asking for what Donald Revell calls “the groundless belief in fearful / Attention.” “Fearful” gives us humans pause; we want to be invulnerable, yet with this trio, the mode is to stand, aware of the ground shifting beneath us.

What distinguishes Brenda Hillman’s Three Talks, a “critical” address to writer and reader, is that it acts as eco-manifesto, self-help guide, and activist prompt, surveying “six forces of poetry,” namely (as her subtitle has it) “Metaphor and Metonymy, Meaning and Mystery, Magic and Morality.” Revell and Som, too, obsess over mystery, magic, and morality. For Hillman, metaphors are, as with Revell and Som, more real than the literal, bound to ecosystems of poetic and ancestral lineage. They each echo Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.” As Brian Teare points out in his introduction to Three Talks, this focus reaches backwards into Hillman’s “now-iconic ecopoetic quartet of books on the classical elements: Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire.” Hillman’s 2018 book Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days studied fungi as an index to a liminal state between life and death. In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022) addresses our “unprecedented” times—California wildfires, climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic—in a kind of hymn to the unknown. Throughout, Hillman engages in a practice of “crypto-animist activism,” a phrase she defines (in Linda Russo and Marthe Reed’s wonderful 2018 anthology Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene) as follows:

the practice of communicating with or being aware of nonhuman objects, creatures, or presences during such direct actions as civil disobedience, strikes, occupations, demonstrations, or other acts of political resistance or risking arrest. [This practice] considers beetles, finches, flies, moss, dirt, bacteria, foxes, lichen, reeds, or even houseplants within buildings that are having simultaneous existences, whether related or unrelated to human agency or human intentionality.

Hillman takes this methodology seriously, making Three Talks unique in literary-historical criticism. The book zooms in on poems that reinvent their forms to suit their necessities, from the “electrical flow from nature” in William Wordsworth and Whitman through Charles Baudelaire’s “mood” poems of urban landscape to C. D. Wright’s 2009 collection 40 Watts (with its “micro-dream diary with a waking image”), Tongo Eisen-Martin’s paratactic poetics, and Layli Long Soldier’s activist verse (to name several poets she summons for attention). All of these poets, in Hillman’s analysis, speak within and to history, keenly aware of fraught ecosystems.

We may think of Cleanth Brooks and his influential (if now outmoded) The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947), where the critic selects 10 poems, from the metaphysicals to the moderns, to discover paradoxes, ironies, and metaphors that engender a formal self-sufficing universalism. Brooks’s title comes from John Donne’s “The Canonization”: “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms; / As well a well-wrought urn becomes / The greatest ashes.” The poem transmutes a secular lover’s assertion into miracle: “You […] Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove / Into the glasses of your eyes.”

By contrast, Hillman insists that time and the timeless operate in tandem. Worried over aesthetic moorings, Brooks feared that historical analysis would relegate poetic study to a form of anthropology; thus, he embraced the case for universal structures. New Critical texts such as Brooks’s shaped “close reading” from the 1950s through the early 1980s as the dominant mode for teaching poetry. Brooks, and others such as William Empson and John Crowe Ransom, asserted that the poem need not be read in relation to the exterior world, biographically or historically, but should be judged rather as an autonomous object, taut in its tropes. In this postwar viewpoint, poetry was obliged to save us from reality by establishing protective little worlds: flammable subjects may be expressed within safe containers.

I invoke the starkly different Brooks and Hillman to underscore how Three Talks marks a 21st- century alternative poetics, freely including an ecological and activist worldview that cannot be separate from the writing of poems. The New Critic would never write, as Hillman does, “I have a great deal of respect for bacteria.” The statement has to do with the bacteria in oil refineries the poet has protested, as well as her gratitude for the bacteria that grow in our guts. Her guide to poetics invokes formal strategies to connect with larger spheres and alternative communities where metaphor or metonymy can’t satisfy—without showing complex “gut” intestacies.

A poem, for Hillman, participates in an ecosystem of multiple facets—of gender, race, politics, war, and other messy irreconcilable elements that won’t allow for a “well-wrought urn” to hold them. In fact, in her last book, the poem “Escape & Song” reorchestrates Donne’s lover: “that our ashes might mingle in the dust … // In the garage, an orb weaver spider / lines its web with trash & shines like galaxies.” 

Here, metonymy is radical besideness (the “garage” and the “web”) and beyondness (“galaxies”). Love, as Hillman shows, does not purely exist in human modes. Not the “knower” or “master” of organic matter, she talks to plants, addresses insects and animals. She thinks of the Big Bang daily. This aesthetic guidebook also uniquely gives a model for how to contend with “the grief of the Anthropocene”: “I think of some hidden idea and/or fact of other species, of the spiders, the extremophiles, the kingfisher, the finches, the grasses, the tides and sea mammals, even those at risk.” Hers is a refusal of androcentrism, given that “humans are not the center but only one of 8.7 million species.” Hillman remarks that she started drafting this volume while “the Capitol building [was] being stormed by white supremacists” on January 6, 2021.

Hillman specifically aims to impart “energy that poetry can bring as we live through a series of profound historical crises together.” Her writing here is reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929) as she wistfully hopes to inspire those who wish to have an imaginative life, one directly linked to our ethical and ecological experience. Each of her talks gives instructions. For the first chapter, she asks us to resist “too much brain-deadening time on social media” and “to develop [our] habit of being a walking dreamer, with one foot inside daily life, to cultivate straddling multiple associations and kinds of time.” She encourages us to use imagination in “forming relationships to otherness, to dream or vision and metaphor, with a metonymic relationship to realism, […] to constitute a shared grammar of reality that moves from the unknown to the known.”

Hillman’s first talk in the book compactly clarifies the difference between metaphor and metonymy (she calls them “dizygotic twins”): “Metaphors involve states of being that leap into the unknown, whereas metonymy helps us with the placement in time, history, story, and linearity, […] the sister skill no less important to poets than is metaphor.” These building blocks are active modes of “trance”-portation for Hillman, who offers an example of a Steller’s jay (with photo), with “its pointy black crown and hood,” as being reminiscent of “an executioner of Robespierre in 1789.” The meaning of metaphor is literally to carry across or between, the opportunity to link far-distant elements—in this case, a contemporary viewing of a bird linked to an important figure in the French Revolution, a fitting subject for our unruly times.

In the second talk, “Meaning and Mystery,” the soul becomes “a metaphor for a process of making meaning, including the states of depression and emotional struggle.” The etymology of “meaning” shares an Indo-European root with “moaning,” both from “mei-no,” which translates to “opinion or intention.” Meaning needs “mystery” (what others call “difficulty”) because “what is intended and what is held in secret […] make fine dance partners.” Quoting Barbara Guest (inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Hillman contends that “a poem must be both obscure and clear.” She describes reading aloud, during a power outage caused by the 2019 California wildfires, T. S. Eliot’s often-dubbed “too difficult” poem The Waste Land (1922) with her students “by the light of our phones.” Eliot’s “indirection and disjunction,” “nonlinearity, shifts, and paradoxes” were freshly relevant.

The third talk pairs magic and morality. Hillman offers examples of poems of moral outrage (such as Camille Dungy’s “Brevity”), as well as her own activist projects. Poets can be socially responsible in unusual ways. She recollects that, for 15 years while teaching, she would set up vigils where she (and others) “had secret conversations with oaks, lichens, beetles, and mosses, as well as with the souls of dead writers.” During the Iraq War, she protested by not paying taxes (in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau), and took red-eye flights to Washington, DC, with CODEPINK to lobby in the “zones of power.” As if to cast a spell, she engages in ritual practices that call for higher awareness: “I read notes to nonhuman creatures. One afternoon, I interviewed dead bugs on the Capitol carpet. In a Senate committee chamber, there was a fly buzzing around the room and I thought of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar.” But to be clear, Hillman is very practical, visiting young staffers to protest various bills, assuring us that “poetic space and the political space are not two different spaces. Poetry is not a decoration, to be used just for weddings and funerals.” She advises that “small actions” tackling social ills should accompany (even energize) the writing of poetry.

Three Talks is a refreshing primer in ecological consciousness and in giving poetry permission—to be strange, aware, uncomfortable. Exploring the worlds of the visible (metonymy, meaning, morality) in concert with the invisible (metaphor, mystery, magic), her book chimes with Revell’s and Som’s new works.

¤

Donald Revell’s most recent poetry volume, Canandaigua, generously rewards the serious reader on many levels. He offers capillaries, lifelines to a great synthetic knowledge; we can almost stitch the whole of nature and art and theology together. The title poem, the last in the volume, reaches a crescendo, pivoting upon the ongoing, haunting theme of our human expulsion from Eden, real and imagined. It has a telling epigraph from Donald Britton, a queer poet, who died of complications from AIDS in 1994, with his second volume In the Empire of the Air published posthumously in 2016: “My love / exists to prove you impossible” projects the sense that, if God does not accept “deviancy,” then He is “impossible.” But Revell teases more out of this impossibility, and the wide gap that tantalizes the God-seeker: “Love me / Where never once you found me”—a paradoxical negative space infused with echoes of St. John of the Cross, defining “the way up” as “the way down.”

Revell spent many teaching years in the West, but he grew up in the Bronx. The locus of his new book is the East Coast, focusing on an upstate pastoral town in decline, Canandaigua. The name comes from the Seneca, the “Great Hill People,” a group of Indigenous Iroquoian living south of Lake Ontario, and translates to “chosen spot.” A paradise lost. Industrialism, capitalism, eco-blindness, triumphal progress—all are symptomatic of the usurpation of the Indigenous. Among this town’s relics are a shoe parlor, a merry-go-round, and, more saddening, an “emptied” public library with “bare shelves.” Still, when Revell writes “Love me” to “the not unwilling town,” the village also speaks. Even with windows “whited with disuse and birdlime,” there is enough left “to love onto the exit,” such as “actual geese.” The barren town provokes a resistant love that Revell practices throughout even as he suffers “the death of allegory.” The book creates a lineage for the cultivation of truth, beauty, wisdom, and, for Revell, faith—with Geoffrey Hill providing an epigraph for the second half of the book: “So what is faith if it is not inescapable endurance?” In Revell’s hands, this arduous practice conjures an eco-despondency that leads to “solastalgia,” defined by the Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht as the experience of homesickness by those whose landscapes are desecrated. For Revell, this unhappiness is expressive of our fallen state.

Revell, an uncloseted Christian, implicitly compares climate crisis and extinction to the effects of an allegorical expulsion from Eden and an inevitable sense of apocalypse. This dioramic world, largely sprung from the poet’s early and present New York, is most definitively postlapsarian, following up on W. B. Yeats’s “Second Coming,” with its “rough beast” emerging as “Actual Man,” Revell’s rendering of modern humanity. The theological and the ecological converge as possible parallel narratives, as the tree that Jesus was crucified upon links up with a tribe of trees, from the first poem, “Outrage,” where a “new tree uprooted and thrown / Into the street” is imagined as knowing “the brief agony of the Absolute,” followed by “the deformity of fire.” This volume’s first section unfolds from an epigraph from W. H. Auden’s bucolic “Woods”: “They cannot fool us with how fast they go, // How much they cost each other and the gods,” lines suggestive of devotion as well as gauging the “cost” of human disregard. In another poem, “The Archaic,” centering on “fires,” the speaker identifies with the Creator: “I have a forest to mourn, / Corresponding to God, as God / Walked through the woods and the woods / Vanished behind Him.” Revell calls his “faith” an “archaic praise of that vanishing”—a somewhat chilling idea of God slipping away, leaving a ghost earth where the believer-speaker “nearly saw / A bighorn o’erleap the flames.” The poet’s foreshortening of “overleap” purposely marks his resistance to the destruction of life-giving forests.

Revell, like Hillman, addresses recent tragedies. “Light, Zeal” concentrates on one of “the first days of the pandemic” with the image of a peahen (who returns later) that “came to live in our yard.” The scene unfolds an allegory of “the first days of creation,” wrecked by “harm”:

Weeks later, at first light, I found,
In its full display, a white peacock
Facing her. The smaller birds fell silent,
Gathered into crowns on the black tree,
Silent. Boldness and nothingness in pride
Imaged the soul of fire whispering

Out of Eden future Edens, a dozen
Names for every creature, and new green
Buds on the dead willow. Impossible
To find any harm in extravagance taking
Refuge, undertaking the old purposes of
Creation. But harm there was. 

This “harm” is “zeal without knowledge, awe / Where tenderness ought to have looked away.” The less gaudy female peahen faced with the flamboyantly colored peacock performs before the speaker and the “smaller birds,” transfixed by this mating rite. In conversation with all the poems, especially the last title poem, this one quotes from Pascal: “Where is God? Where you are not, / And the kingdom of God is within you.” In other words, humility and ego-erasure beckon inner divinity. The ecological outcome of pride is simply “scorched earth, and menacing vapor— / Tatterdemalion adorning itself. / Inherit the earth. Invent the earth.” Here “Adam / Hears the bitter echo of his beginning.” Allegory allows for a new Adam, a new earth, even as the poem is sardonic about human forgetfulness. Note the deft repetition of words like “harm” and “God,” the book as a whole tying itself together through recurrent motifs and word-stitches as would a tapestry.

The poet defines, in “Thistle,” “Progress, the antithesis / Of change,” modified as “Slow change, antique nursery of music, / Joy.” The thistle (“antithesis” lingers in the word) is a flowering plant with sharp prickled leaves, durable, determined, growing wildly and quickly. The poem picks up the “ruined” body of New York from the poem “Communards” and its fantasies of love:

Manhattan walls itself off.
The continent abolishes its mountains.
The Chrysler Building writes a novel
About an immigrant writing a novel.
I’d meant to love a woman with wires of hair,
But I love you. Eternity has a taxi
All to itself. Rain, rain. Your hand touches
My hair, and we must keep walking. We must
Remember to pray. God was a mountain once. 

The poem pokes fun at “Actual Man,” whose “mock epic” speaks of his “‘Victorious victimhood!”: “He might as well be a window fallen / Into a flood upstate,” in a city where “the taller / Buildings seem to menace little churches / Of cloud and eclipse in the alleyways.” Revell reassures us that all we need is our “own heart” with this vigorous one-liner (his epigrammatic assertions circulate like tonic): “You needn’t remember your heart to beat it.” Prayer, by extension, is a poetry that does not have to be forced, and thus is freed for such inventive measures, with words echoed and reechoed in various stanzas, as Revell sings out, rarely rhyming, but creating melodies as natural to the heart as its beat. This poem, like many in this book, is wry: “Apocalypse is as you find it.” The self-entitled victim is self-destructive and disruptive of ecological systems: “I am pretty well convinced that suicide / Explains the whales and the metal railings / At Battery Park.” Apparently, the dead bodies call out to whales. The poem mourns a specific “you and I” that “fifty years ago when Manhattan felt / Like a real island and not like a madhouse / Grievance bulwarked against flowers and faith.” This long poem also mourns the loss of contact to rain, to flowers, to song, recalling in ecstatic tones what has been lost, wrecked:

Was the original flower a white one
Covering the island from end to end,
Not owned and not, therefore, in need of colors?
A white flower was the first window
Opened to the world. Human eyes
Could recognize themselves in the cluster,
Seeing the harmless sun shaped into petals,
Sensing a fathering and a mothering
In sunlight gentled there to simple vision.
Heaven is fine until the image of heaven
Catches fire inside a cloud and comes to earth. 

Two “heavens” bookend a line (protecting paradise), moving from union with beauty to dismantling fires (figured as the end of the world), while the poem notes that, as it is being written, Notre Dame is burning. The fire, with its “million televised images,” was apparently caused by an electrical problem in its renovation, an ill-fit technology for the medieval cathedral. We have gotten ahead of ourselves, this poem seems to say, wanting words to be rain for quenching flames. Revell’s book is a hopeless anthem full of hope. And apocalypse.

¤

In line with Hillman, “harms” and “malice” recur in Revell’s elegant book, which faces the lack of “morality” that results in wrecked communities and ecological disasters. Brandon Som’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Tripas, like Revell’s unexpected title, denotes several interrelated keys: it references small innards of farm animals used in Mexican cuisine, as well as pages of a document, foregrounding the poet’s playful tripping off the tongue. The book’s distinct brilliance lies in its linguistic mobility and myriad vocabulary. Growing up in a polyglot household where his father’s Chinese and his mother’s Spanish both melded with English, Som surveys geopolitical and lingual diaspora in multilayered, evocative lyric soundings seamlessly surcharged with activism.

Som’s first full-length collection, The Tribute Horse (2014), channels his grandfather’s arrival at Angel Island Immigration Station near San Francisco. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, fueled by xenophobia, was renewed in some form or other until China became an ally in World War II. Som’s grandfather himself arrived as a legal phantom, with a fake or “paper” name that attached the immigrant to an already settled relative. In Tripas, Som turns to both his ancestral lines, yet this time he centers on his grandmother’s work in the first Motorola factory, helping to construct mobile phones—to tell her story as well as that of his broader family lines, through metaphors of circuitry, shifting linguistic meanings, and examinations of how what is lost in translation can be recovered in novel ways through hearing anew. Som creates a space for imaginative recreation as part of an immigrant’s resistance to dominant culture.

In the prose poem “Teléfono Roto,” which introduces Tripas, he refers to his grandmother’s labor “on the [factory] line at Motorola.” The “line” is both genealogical and poetic—and, as such, a crosshatched conduction. At the outset, ecological damage is human harm. Nana heroically “inspected the endless circuitry through microscopes,” yet the components of these early phones were, we learn,

washed, degreased, with toxic solvents—trichloroethylene—that Motorola for years spilled & flushed carelessly. A plume of poisoned groundwater stretches beneath Phoenix from the east valley to the west, past downtown where [his] father ran his store, a tiendita called Fay’s, but that many knew as los chinos.

Som’s dual ancestral lines meet in Phoenix. His father, we learn adjacently, had a “nine-year fight with cancer.” These metonymic assertions suggest that the father quite possibly suffered from Motorola’s groundwater poisoning.

By 1989, Motorola had moved to Mexico, after incurring “fines for what’s now a Superfund site.” Som establishes the geographic circuit, this “production line from Phoenix, to Guadalajara, to subsidiaries in Guangzhou,” the very province from which his grandfather emigrated. But the book is not solely about the circuitous routes of oppressed family members. Like everything here, there is a doubleness, at the least. Som identifies the technology of the mobile phone as his “family’s song, in broken pieces, bits of gossip like a game of telephone or Chinese whispers—your own, your own,” with the siren song of a Llorona ghost from Mexican folklore who haunts bodies of water, who cries “from those little phones inside our pockets.” His “nana says she heard the story first as a child & then years later, on the line at Motorola.” “Roto” in Spanish also signifies “broken,” so the very magic of the telephone—casting invisible connections—as with the “paper name,” has rending force, yet offers poetic correlatives to ancestry, communication, and writing. The ecological harm caused by capitalism conveys itself through workers, endangered by poisons created by mass production and low-wage work.

Most notable is the way Som honors his ancestral complexity through mingling languages and allusions, taking climactic metaphoric leaps—and he does this soaringly, inviting the reader to join what amounts to a lubricious sound bath to liberate subterranean narratives. “Code Switches” maps alternating linguistic markers, stitching an ever-woven self in flux. The poem, shuttling to and from the margins, not only enacts linguistic translations but also lives in them through jump-cut associations

                Cómo se dice, my circuitry, sews me—me cose—
        word by word & dictates—how do you say?
                        She translates, wires me, rewires rosary—Rosario
                was my mom’s name, she tells me. Decades pray me
        an aria con cuerdas—como Ariadne. My dark moles,

                she says, are lunares. I think astronaut, a May moon
        at perigee.

Leading with the Spanish for “how do you say?” expresses the inexpressibility of a complex sense of an inherited “circuitry,” being sewn (me cose). Throughout, Som disrupts the notion of a singular “Eyedentity” (as he describes in “Chino”) and the Western foregrounding of visual prowess through sonic reverberations as “aura” in a tour de force of wavelength and sound webs. How does one speak beyond sedimented meanings? the poems seem to ask, as they question the possibility of a never fully fathomed self that took “dictates” and “decades” to be prayed into being. Rosario, the name of the speaker’s nana’s mother, holds rosary in it, after all. He creates an “aria con cuerdas”—one voice playing two notes at once as if on different instruments, his Chinese and Mexican wires playing in fecund slippage. The act of seeing turns aural and tactile so that skin moles (“lunares” in Spanish) connect the speaker to the otherworldly textured moon, one at its “perigee,” nearest earth.

The second stanza bursts, unexpectedly hallucinating the intestinal cell phone and the chains of laborers composing it: “I see lasso & chain link in the componentry, / an analemma tracing dagongmei & ensambladoras / from rural town to city factory.” The “analemma” refers to a diagram showing the sun’s position—like the “lunares” that belong to the linguistic traversal through “dagongmei” (referencing Chinese migrant workers, specifically women) and “ensambladoras” (the Mexican women, like his nana, working on an assembly line), tracing a trajectory of “rural town to city factory.”

The ecopoetic attention this book wields discovers a palimpsest of machinery and the natural, overlaying each other through nuance—as well as in blank gaps. In the notes on “Raspadas,” Som tells us that the proper word for the titular “shaved ice treats” is raspados; his change suggesting that the poem’s subject, his great-grandmother, represents a hymn to female labor.

        Just west
                                        of stockyard
                        slaughter & Union
                                                Pacific tracks, she
        too conducted
                       that silver arm,

        in her home’s
                                        small storefront,
                        feeding ice
                                                        to shaving teeth.
        In raspar,
                        hear her voice’s
                       

        saw-scratch

This rasping links to Rosario as “Ronco” (harsh) and “call[s] up” (as on a transistor) “enfermo,” sickness in the surrounds, “like bronco / & bronchitis & those / roping winds / in mesquite— / open opera, / these trees hoarse // with asthma.” Yet within this ailing environment, Rosario provided the soothing raspadas and “poured flavors / from bottles / lit like church glass.” We also learn she came from Sinaloa in 1917 “smuggling swaddled-tight // cockatoos / silenced over the / border / with coos & seed.” She also fed the “gold-toothed / cattlemen.” Magic emerges in this operatic environment where sound is metaphoric, the voice with its “saw-scratch.”

Skill and ill are braided in Som’s hyperaware interconnectivity, his sensibility of things related in words and in the things words signify as sounds. “Twin Plant” conjures his nana on the line, in the background, a supervisor’s dictate: “Move your hands as fast as your mouths.” With this section’s epigraph by Janice Lobo Sapigao, “if the codes make us complicit” (with its “if” that has no completion), this complicity for Som becomes imbrication. Everything binds to everything else, if looked at carefully. Sounds exist already as metaphors—the “rasping” asthmatic sound of great-grandmother, for instance, is her aura.

With his eye on the imbrication of what seems only like two sides, “Twin Plant” records that, by 1968, Motorola had moved nana’s “line work” with “duty-free parts from factory to fábrica, over the border, to be assembled with cheaper labor,” but when nana retires in the 1990s, during a rise in the “murders of maquila workers,” Som reflects that his “grandmother may have had a part, a chip she inspected, placed inside a product by a woman working in Juárez.” This makes the poet “shy & frightened,” underscoring tactile interconnectivity. The connection of Nana holding the phone and someone else holding one she struck life into, as it were, links many others, gesturing at both complicity and solidarity. Som writes, “Hearing, it’s said, is touch at a distance,” detecting sound waves braiding life-forms in “creosote & Parliaments—tenor & rasp / that side-winds cell towers over chevrons / of ocotillo, through ironwood & arroyo, // moving in the megahertz her hands made.” The voice at one million cycles per second contains landscapes vibrating with dualities, textures: among these, creosote, a toxin (a chemical producing tar) and preserver (its tar helps meld bridges together, and it can be used as an antiseptic), alongside the flowering ocotillo plant, a semi-succulent also called candlewood, all coexisting with the proper name of his nana’s cigarettes (which connects her to empire and capital), as well as with the dry watercourse of the arroyo (where we may well hear Llorona cry).

The ecopoetic consciousness of Tripas is most evident in “Resistors,” where the poet investigates Motorola at its site in Phoenix before Guadalajara “took the line.” He revisits his childhood “one-bedroom duplex west of Papago’s /greasewood & buttes of sandstone,” a block away from where his nana scoped phones. At this memorial intersection, a woman protests development, the eating away of ecosystems:

        I hear the woman today protest from the bucket
                of a front-end loader—a Caterpillar, by her presence,
        dumbstruck on tread wheels tall as vault doors, its maw

        metal hollow, a confessional or old Mountain Bell
                phone booth she stepped into amid the felled saguaro
        & ribs of organ pipe. Her body where dirt goes says

        her body is the land the wall wants to eat. I stream this—
                download by data plan, by bandwidth, from the cloud
        servers deep in their grid deserts to the crystalline

        & rare earth minerals making my cell phone
                black box theater, making her code, making her
        algorithm—

The labor of extraction necessary for cell phones impinges violently upon the woman’s body, the earth and its saguaros, its “organ pipe”—referring to the desert cactus, recognized as simile in its naming, all muted by the “maw” of so-called progress. Yet even so, it is the “cloud servers” that broadcast the very protest Som witnesses in a “black box theater”: acts of resistance can be disseminated; our portable theaters, while perpetuating ecological infractions, also contain “resistors.”

As if following Hillman’s bid, this is a text that lives by linking outward, and as in Revell’s book, lines swerve like the wild, purposeful mycelium of roots stretching out everywhere. Proximity and unraveling engender a subtle echoing from “hecho,” the “made” of things. Som is an intimate descendant of the hardships of factory labor while finding in it an aural afterlife. Som plumbs and hones words by his metaphoric pliers and scopes inherited from his nana, and in the process, ancestral debt attains a vivid, expansive grandness. Taken together, this trio of books creates a new ground to explore the impact of modernity and technology on the 21st-century poetic imagination.