Such an Effortful Green

Abstract

"Such an Effortful Green" is a book of fragmented voices and relationships. An effort of the book is to unite the mind and the body; to define the body by what exists in the mind. Because much of the book is occupied with thinking about space in a mind-body union, the book contains space in its pages. The form of the book is fragmentary and full of space as if to question and highlight the space that bodies take up. It doesn’t come together until the end and even then, readers don’t get all the answers they want. It is also born of dichotomies: the land and the ocean, awe and uncertainty, full and empty. While much of the book is unable to settle, there are recurring images throughout, such as the shrimp, cougar, and the speaker’s childhood. The speaker is preoccupied with such uncertainty in herself, but she finds awe, and comfort, in the natural world that exists outside of the human world. At its core, this book attempts to name, to understand, what it means to be a body, both in the human and nonhuman world.