John Shoptaw, a leading voice in ecopoetics, is widely published in many of the most respected literary journals and magazines, including Arion, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Poetry. His first poetry collection, Times Beach (2015), won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award in Poetry.
In Near-Earth Object, Shoptaw explores the interactions, sometimes dark and sometimes joyful, between humans and the non-human natural world. Resisting the human exceptionalism that in its many forms can block imaginative access to the world, Shoptaw entertains the perspectives of a host of others: a cricket, a bat, a nuthatch, a carnival bear, a tree’s shade, cherubim, an asteroid, and Earth herself.
John Shoptaw teaches in the UC Berkeley English Department. He is the author of On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry, the libretto for Eric Sawyer’s opera Our American Cousin (Boston Modern Orchestra Project), and a number of essays on poetry and poetics, including “Why Ecopoetry?” (Poetry).
Listen to John Shoptaw on podcasts from Authors Unbound and Chrysalis.
What you hold in your hands is a book, but a poem is first and foremost a song, just like the songs of birds, crickets, frogs, and whales. The impulse to sing comes from the impulse to live, and it’s catching. I encourage you to return to these poems multiple times and to read them aloud — to yourself, to your friends, maybe even to the birds. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ll find shelter in them from shifting weather systems of wonder, sorrow, gratitude, and anger.
Shoptaw’s deeper imperative, though—spiritual, aesthetic, cultural—is to speak on behalf of a bruised ecosystem, enriching but mightily imperiled.
For those of us who still hold out hope for our imperiled planet, these poems offer a riveting testimony of devotion… Near-Earth Object reveals what loving our planet really looks like, and what stirring music such love can make.
Shoptaw’s poetry anthology considers an environment in peril, highlighting the beauty of what could be lost... A stirring ecopoetic collection that moves readers to protect the beauty of the natural world.