Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2026)
Cover art: "There Was A Forest Here" by Ann Phong
Forthcoming on May 11, 2026 from Scarlet Tanager Books
Unique in its scope, Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War, offers a vital perspective that has rarely been considered: war’s destruction of the more than human environment. Arranged more or less chronologically, 90 poems and their contextual notes by 61 contemporary poets bring into vivid focus the eco-injustice of military damages in 37 nations on 6 continents and on the moon. Framed by a cogent introduction and a pair of forewords, one on poetry, the other on science, and accompanied by a tally of environmental costs and a set of thought-provoking discussion and writing prompts, this groundbreaking anthology will rouse readers to confront intolerable devastation, yet also to envision restoration of the natural world.
Bringing light to a dark place, these geographically and historically wide-reaching poems illuminate how war pulls, from under our feet, the earth on which we stand and pollutes even the air we breathe. Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War is unique in its scope and its focus on how war’s intolerable human cost is inseparable from the devastation of nature and its non-human animals—war against life itself. Though, like green shoots from a charred root, here, too, are poems of eloquent witness to nature’s humbling power of resilience and restoration. —Eleanor Wilner, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets
Convergence contains burst after burst of pure poetic anguish for animals, plants, and humans. This insightful, one-of-a-kind anthology seeks to capture the scale of our staggering inhumanity in war, where restraints are absent. Three gifted editors have chosen poems that bear witness to the environmental ravages of war in hopes of rousing our sensibilities about what we have done to our planet. Convergence may well transform readers’ perceptions, motivating them to become stewards and caregivers of the Earth. —Scott McVay, cetologist, poet, explorer, founding Executive Director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation
What powerful poems coeditors Teresa Mei Chuc, Anne Coray, and J. C. Todd have gathered in the splendid new anthology Convergence—a collection that confronts us with the suffering and death inflicted on other-than-human beings by human actions. From ancient Rome to the wars of colonization, through the two World Wars, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the destruction of Gaza, these poems bear eloquent witness to the fact, as Sean Mclain Brown writes in a note to his poem “Migration,” “There are no winners in war.” And as Gillian Clarke comments in her note to “Lament,” “War can’t be waged without grave damage to every aspect of life. . . . The ashes of language are the death of truth during war.” Reading this book, may we be changed by it. —Ann Fisher-Wirth, Mississippi Poet Laureate, Coeditor, Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology
Convergence tells an important story. It’s a story for the Earth and for all of humanity. It offers a vital perspective on war history that has rarely been considered, focusing on damage to ecosystems and the flora and fauna that animate them. Organized chronologically, these poems guide us through the deep history of war’s impact on the living world, each poem accompanied by a brief statement providing historical context. The inescapable irony is that writing about damage to the natural world is also writing about damage to the human world because the essential principle of ecology is that Earth and all its creatures, including us, are interconnected and interdependent. —Anne McCrary Sullivan, naturalist, poet, author of Notes of A Marine Biologist’s Daughter
Unique in its scope, Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War, offers a vital perspective that has rarely been considered: war’s destruction of the more than human environment. Arranged more or less chronologically, 90 poems and their contextual notes by 61 contemporary poets bring into vivid focus the eco-injustice of military damages in 37 nations on 6 continents and on the moon. Framed by a cogent introduction and a pair of forewords, one on poetry, the other on science, and accompanied by a tally of environmental costs and a set of thought-provoking discussion and writing prompts, this groundbreaking anthology will rouse readers to confront intolerable devastation, yet also to envision restoration of the natural world.
Bringing light to a dark place, these geographically and historically wide-reaching poems illuminate how war pulls, from under our feet, the earth on which we stand and pollutes even the air we breathe. Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War is unique in its scope and its focus on how war’s intolerable human cost is inseparable from the devastation of nature and its non-human animals—war against life itself. Though, like green shoots from a charred root, here, too, are poems of eloquent witness to nature’s humbling power of resilience and restoration. —Eleanor Wilner, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets
Convergence contains burst after burst of pure poetic anguish for animals, plants, and humans. This insightful, one-of-a-kind anthology seeks to capture the scale of our staggering inhumanity in war, where restraints are absent. Three gifted editors have chosen poems that bear witness to the environmental ravages of war in hopes of rousing our sensibilities about what we have done to our planet. Convergence may well transform readers’ perceptions, motivating them to become stewards and caregivers of the Earth. —Scott McVay, cetologist, poet, explorer, founding Executive Director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation
What powerful poems coeditors Teresa Mei Chuc, Anne Coray, and J. C. Todd have gathered in the splendid new anthology Convergence—a collection that confronts us with the suffering and death inflicted on other-than-human beings by human actions. From ancient Rome to the wars of colonization, through the two World Wars, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the destruction of Gaza, these poems bear eloquent witness to the fact, as Sean Mclain Brown writes in a note to his poem “Migration,” “There are no winners in war.” And as Gillian Clarke comments in her note to “Lament,” “War can’t be waged without grave damage to every aspect of life. . . . The ashes of language are the death of truth during war.” Reading this book, may we be changed by it. —Ann Fisher-Wirth, Mississippi Poet Laureate, Coeditor, Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology
Convergence tells an important story. It’s a story for the Earth and for all of humanity. It offers a vital perspective on war history that has rarely been considered, focusing on damage to ecosystems and the flora and fauna that animate them. Organized chronologically, these poems guide us through the deep history of war’s impact on the living world, each poem accompanied by a brief statement providing historical context. The inescapable irony is that writing about damage to the natural world is also writing about damage to the human world because the essential principle of ecology is that Earth and all its creatures, including us, are interconnected and interdependent. —Anne McCrary Sullivan, naturalist, poet, author of Notes of A Marine Biologist’s Daughter
