Plenty

Using Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a springboard, Corinne Lee’s second book of poetry is an eco-epic that investigates and embodies the deterioration of America’s environment due to industrial agriculture, fossil fuels, war, racism, and technology. Lee’s book-length work draws upon a variety of poetic forms and histories—especially events in 1892, which included a surge in lynching in America and the beginning of our coup d’etat of Hawaii—to examine how modern technology facilitated the Holocaust, sustains America’s racist prison industrial complex, fuels climate change, and ultimately underlies what has been called the Sixth Extinction. A daring and dazzling narrative of great originality,Plenty advocates a feminist ecobuddhist perspective: only by dismantling false hierarchies, especially those of patriarchal capitalism, are we able to recognize that all agents of environmental collapse are one with us.

Corinne Lee’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in dozens of literary magazines. Her debut collection, PYX, was selected by Pattiann Rogers as a winner of the National Poetry Series competition and was published by Penguin. Ms. Lee was chosen by the Poetry Society of America as one of the top ten emerging poets in America. Six of her poems have been included inBest American Poetry. She was educated at the University of Southern California, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in the Texas Hill Country.