21st Century North American Ecocriticism: The Contestation of the Post-Human Condition in Political Cactus Poems by Jonathan Skinner

Abstract

In the North American poetic context, the exchange of a recognized ontology based on the concept of nature as an extra-human universe, and its concomitant poetic epistemology are highlighted in contrast to the devastating results of modern capitalism. Besides this, ecocriticism’s place in the United States community of poets offers the possibility of generating a new concept of transnationalism. An anti-hegemonic and deconstructive metalanguage is born from eco-critical poetry as an expression of a possible paradigm whose goal is to serve as the vanguard to a confrontation with a majority sociopolitical current. An example little studied or recognized in the environment of the Portuguese language, yet whose presence falls in a propitious moment for the expansion of studies on ecocritical literature at a transnational and global level is the North American poet, Jonathan Skinner. His first collection of poems, Political Cactus Poems (2005), reveals a novel, extra-human epistemology in which nature recovers its primacy by way of the expression of a natural ethic.