Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781982195304)

A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.

In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.

Author: Camille T. Dungy
ISBN-10: 1982195304
ISBN-13: 9781982195304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Language: English
Published: 05/02/2023
Pages: 336
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.20w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 12/01/2022 pg. 23
Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2023
Publishers Weekly 03/20/2023
Library Journal 04/01/2023 pg. 120
Shelf Awareness 05/05/2023
Booklist 05/15/2023 pg. 7
BookPage 05/01/2023