The Verdant
The Verdant tells of springtime emergence in intimate attunement with the more-than-human world. It is a spacious, lyrical serial poem that holds myriad presences and voices in an imaginative terrain beyond human individualism. Over a lunar cycle, from the Flower Moon of May to the Strawberry Moon of June, the verdant, who is “charged to comprehend,” escapes capitalocene logics and temporalities to find vibrancy, companionship, and counsel among other beings. Through deepening immersion, land community reveals an interspecies amplitude particular to the prairie, woods, and waterways of the high desert of the inland northwestern US. What arises is a mystical daybook of entanglement with animal and plant others that documents the urgency of becoming newly human and fostering a biome-centered energetics.
With “novel pronoun," shrinking dominating capital I to open-hearted (, Russo softens human trespass to passage, and passage to perception of who humans might be amid our true reality of multispecies being. No chance, after reading The Verdant, of bunker fantasies or a simulacrum of life on Mars protected from the consequences of trying not to be, after all, human.
—Marcella Durand
2024 | ISBN: 978-1957483207
Middle Creek Publishing
Midwinter Constellation
On December 22, 2018, the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer’s writing of Midwinter Day, 32 women poets typed into Google Docs titled Dreams, Morning, Noontime, Afternoon, Evening, and Night. Following the six-part structure of Mayer’s book, the writers – Stephanie Anderson, Hanna Andrews, Julia Bloch, Susan Briante, Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Shanna Compton, Mel Coyle, Marisa Crawford, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, Arielle Greenberg, Jenny Gropp, Stefania Heim, MC Hyland, erica kaufman, Becca Klaver, Caolan Madden, Pattie McCarthy, Monica McClure, Jenn Marie Nunes, Danielle Pafunda, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, Khadijah Queen, Linda Russo, Katie Jean Shinkle, Evie Shockley, Sara Jane Stoner, Dawn Sueoka, Bronwen Tate, Catherine Wagner, Elisabeth Workman, and Mia You – composed alongside each other all day, dozens of cursors blinking in a virtual happening. Part patchwork quilt, part collective consciousness, Midwinter Constellation hopes “to prove the day like the dream has everything in it,” as Mayer wrote in 1978, and to extend her vision into a global 21st-century everyday.
2022 | ISBN: 978-1-62557-030-7
Black Lawrence Press
Counter-Desecration
A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene
In imagining a book that would clarify the new ways that we respond to the call our earth, her oceans, and the surrounding atmosphere surely sing, Counter-Desecreations brings sustenance and power with terms made in collective remedying. From Dysoptics to echolocution, reciproesis to terrotic, the countenance of communication encounters the need of a global population on its mettle. Torpor (the rest state required of an activist) and Vivitocracy (social mindset built on the idea that all life deserves equally to exist) bring a sense that our collective strength and support of the planet might still replenish and recover her ability to continue, and thus we along with her, or at least give a sense of the hope for future life here. This book allows us fortitude and wisdom to secure what means we might to continue to cherish and to equip us to protect our planet with concise and meritorious language and action. A generous undertaking for which I am exceptionally grateful and believe indispensable for writers, speakers, readers, and researchers working for vital cause and solution.
—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, from the Preface
2018 | ISBN: 978-0819578464
Wesleyan University Press
Participant
This long poem of observation, edged with philosophy and critique, floats effortlessly across the page, yet anchors in the consciousness like a vital point on a map of a still not fully visible present and future. Participant’s speaker worries the division between natural and built environments around her, "into the undertone of the other world," while demonstrating how poetry fuses the line between being the observer and the one who makes language bring the invisible into view.
—John Keene
In these beautifully woven poems, as living branches or twigs in a bower, we are proffered a sensitive record of what it means to be alive and thinking among other living things doing their own kinds of thinking. Syllables become the leaves plushing this place we inhabit, this nest in which is gathered a plurality, an ecosystem “spared from data.” There are these and other truths to be found in these pages, where “words for these leaves make the world seem seen.”
—Eleni Sikelianos
2016 | ISBN: 978-0918786623
Lost Roads Publishers
To Think of Her Writing Awash in Light
In inventive and lyrical essays that take up the work of four women writers – Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Hettie Jones, and Anne Waldman – Linda Russo investigates the essayist-poet’s relationship to her subjects and their social and material geographies (in landscapes, archives, and domestic spaces, from Grasmere, England, to Harvard’s Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusettes, to Bolinas, California) and in the process blurs a boundary between "critical" and "creative" writing.
In the tradition of Susan Howe and Lisa Robertson, To Think of Her Writing Awash in Light is a book that might be essay and might be literary criticism and might just be a love poem too. It surprises and delights with its serious beauty.
—Juliana Spahr
Each light inflected visitation holds writing not aloft but as an alive three dimensional thing where we are swaying alongside Linda Russo and a train of others. It’s pure being this reading, that’s its delight as we move about poetry and its moments like it were art, or history intimacy itself and as Russo succinctly puts it “the lack of an ‘authoritative’ reading frets no one involved in this occasion.”
—Eileen Myles
2016 | ISBN: 978-0990661245
Subito Press
Geopoetics in Practice
Geopoetics in Practice offers insights into poetry, place, ecology, and writing the world through a critical-creative geographic lens. It brings together an international cohort of contemporary geographers, poets, and artists who contribute their research, methodologies, and creative writing to engage discourses about space, power, difference, and landscape, as well as about human, non-human, and more-than-human relationships with Earth.
2019 | ISBN: 978-0367145385
Routledge
Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way
Linda Russo has written an exceptional bioregional text—one that re-seeds landscapes with a re-fashioned language of 'interspecies inhabitance.' To go to the root, here, maybe anywhere, is to go into a weaving of multiple strands, to re-order the many layers of displacement, settlement, and development and—finding the remnants of indigenous ecosystems along the bioregional margins—reveal that “things” are once again “assemblies,” coherences around which information gathers. Testing “the analytic capacity of sentient poetry,” Russo encourages us to live simultaneously lightly, and with deeper roots. This is exactly what I’d hoped the meeting of poetry and ecology would give us.
—Stephen Collis
This poetry sings brightly for the ultra-local, itself a collection and dispersion of sympathies, grasped at earth magnitude. I admire Russo’s yard work, as attuned to the ‘workaday’ as to the squawk of unidentified bird calls, for its self-awareness, humor, and sense of beauty.
—Jonathan Skinner
Anthropologist Anna Tsing writes, 'human nature is an interspecies relationship." This charged understanding is echoed throughout Russo’s polyvalent text. Various modes of presencing and thinking are engaged within this capacious document in an effort to thrive within cultivated, regulated, domesticated and also occasionally almost wild domains together with the diverse organisms that make their meanings known.
—Brenda Iijima
2015 | ISBN: 978-1848613935
Shearsman Books