Esther Vincent Xueming
Published: 2021-09-16
Total Pages:
Get eBook
Red Earth is an ecofeminist collection of poems that meditates on place and the making of home. Journeying through the landscape of dreams, memory, time and place, Red Earth locates the speaker in relation to the myriad of places, cultures, people and non-human kin she co-inhabits this world with. Grounded in her local bioregion, and traversing borders and boundaries, Red Earth is a collection of verse that invokes the spirit of place by reinstating a woman's voice amidst the boom of machinery and economy in the context of capitalism, urbanisation and the ensuing alienation from nature. Tracing its poetic lineage to ecofeminist forebearers like Mary Oliver, Eavan Boland, Grace Nichols, Joy Harjo and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Red Earth is an ecofeminist act of solidarity with marginalised others (non-human and human person-beings) and an artifact of social and environmental activism. Situated in Singapore and moving across geographies, Red Earth embodies a new planetary politics of relations that 'makes kin' with fellow person-beings to offer hope and healing in a time of state-sanctioned violence against the land and by proxy, its people, and increasing urban alienation.