03/20/2023
In this meditative outing, poet Dungy (Guidebook to Relative Strangers ) reflects on race and history while discussing the garden she maintains outside her Colorado home. “No matter how many years have passed, no perennial in life’s garden roots more deeply than history,” she contends, using her garden as a metaphor to explore the complex historical relationship between Black Americans and the land. She tells of moving in 2013 with her husband and young daughter, Callie, to a majority-white neighborhood in Fort Collins, Colo., where she started a plot of flowers and vegetables in her yard. Gardening, she writes, helps her “feel rooted,” and she recounts taking pains to explain to Callie the difference between their choosing to garden and the labor of enslaved people forced to work the land. Poems inspired by nature appear throughout, serving as connective tissue for ruminations on the garden of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, 19th-century naturalist John Muir’s racism and sexism, and the overlap between environmental and racial justice. Fans of Dungy’s poetry will delight in her sparkling prose, and the wide-ranging meditations highlight the connections between land, freedom, and race. It’s a lyrical and pensive take on what it means to put down roots. Photos. (May)
A heartfelt and thoroughly enchanting tribute to family and community. Dungy shows us how to tend a garden, and how to tend a full and fragrant life.” —AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, NYT Bestselling Author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments “The green of growing things calms me. Plants stabilize me,” Camille Dungy writes in this brilliant and beautiful memoir of her deepening relationship with the earth that necessarily demands she consider questions of family, history, race, nation, and power. Soil demands we witness what erodes or frays or severs the stabilizing roots between us. Let us put our hands in and try to listen.” –Ross Gay, NYT Bestselling Author of The Book of Delights “Gardening, poetry, motherhood, history—dirty and beautiful, difficult and sublime, the agony of failure, the exhalation of a spring bloom. . . Dungy's poetic ear illuminates her language, whether listing botanical names or reflecting on the tumult of the 2020s. A significant, beautiful, meditative, and wholly down-to-earth memoir with high appeal for book groups and nature lovers.”–BOOKLIST (Starred Review) “Camille Dungy's SOIL is an instant classic. Provocative, beautifully written, and also wildly informative, this memoir cum manifesto asks us to contemplate our responsibility to our land – and each other. I felt transformed by this graceful and generous book.” –Jami Attenberg, Author of I Came All This Way to Meet You “With this book Dungy shows, by comparison, how unrooted so many of us are – ecologically, historically, and socially – and makes a poetic case that home is where you know the plants. This poignant, lovely work will make you want to nurture a garden, and all life.” —Ayana Johnson, Co-founder, Urban Ocean Lab “In Soil, Camille Dungy welcomes us into an abundant, intimate, unfurling space — the exterior landscape of her garden and the interior landscape of her sapience. To dig in the dirt, we learn, is also to dig up and into history, identity, ecology, hope. Dungy shows, by example, how to honor the pain and the possibility of whatever fraught, holy ground we each call home. A deeply life-giving book.” –Katharine Wilkinson, Executive Director of The All We Can Save Project “Camille Dungy is one of the greatest American writers, period. And Soil is her finest work yet. In prose that is personal, political, urgent, and honest, Dungy lays bare the perils of homogeneity —in our gardens and in our communities—and offers powerful reminders of why diversity—that watered-down, defanged buzzword—matters. Soil is a delicate and resilient exploration of gardening, motherhood, memory, love, and what it means to thrive as a Black woman tending her garden, her family, and her career in a white supremacist ecosystem.” –Kate Schatz, NYT-Bestselling author of Rad American Women A-Z and Do the Work: An Antiracist Activity Book “We are all of the soil. Whether clay, sand, loam or rocky till, each of us arises from it. Camille Dungy's Soil, is the new ground work for growing an illumination of our ties to to the precious earth lain under our feet. From what suffers to grow in her Rocky Mountain backyard, through sketches of Black folk's ties to seed, furrow, mule and hoe, she digs into our soul solum with an artfully conversational style, that's bound to a personal and conversational vulnerability, which firmly links everything important to us, to the fertility underfoot. Herein, Dungy winds Earth's care into human justice and wildness, then tends the story of connections to nature past, present and to come, upward around an awareness of how root, tendril, blossom, bird and bee, make us who we are. Camille is our perennial flower, bloomed again in Soil.” –J. Drew Lanham, Author of The Home Place Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature (Milkweed 2016) “What an intoxicating book. Dungy’s words smell of rot, roots, and blossoms. She brings proof that incantations for nature can come from a yard in a subdivision, and that a family can turn hard soil into life.” –Craig Childs, Author of House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
★ 04/01/2023
When Dungy and her family moved to Fort Collins, CO, in 2013, she wanted to create a garden of drought-tolerant and pollinator-supporting plants, but the community had restrictions on what could be grown. In resistance to these homogenous policies, her garden became a vehicle for observations on her life, motherhood, the past, current events, and environmental justice. In this book, Dungy (English, Colorado State Univ.; Guidebook to Relative Strangers) uses her garden as a way to reflect on her heritage) uses her garden as a way to reflect on her heritage and her life. Along the way, she imparts lessons to readers about interconnectedness, belonging, language and learning, all the while writing about pressing environmental issues, such as global warming, natural disasters, and urbanization. Dungy further explores the challenges of being Black in the United States, particularly after the 2016 election. She also comments on the effects that segregation has on Black people and the erasure of people of color from environmental narratives. The author examines life in the COVID era by showing the difficulties of balancing a career and parenthood during a period of additional demands and uncertainty. Throughout, Dungy deftly interconnects environment and social justice issues. VERDICT A poignant portrait of life and its challenges, told through the beauty of nature.—Rebekah Kati
2023-02-25 A Black poet’s memoir of motherhood, gardening, and environmental justice.
In 2020, Dungy, an English professor at Colorado State, located in the majority-White city of Fort Collins, received a Guggenheim fellowship, allowing her to take a break from teaching and focus on documenting her project of transforming what had been a conventional suburban lawn into a pollinator garden full of native plants. “I was supposed to devote the year to capital-P Poetry,” she writes. Then the pandemic hit, requiring her daughter to attend school remotely, and in the fall, one of the many wildfires that roared through the state came within miles of destroying the family home—and with it, the garden. Instead of the conventional nature narrative, in which an individual—most often White and well-off—communes with nature, Dungy offers a more complex, nuanced story in which the experience of nature is vital but is also entangled with race, national and family history, motherhood, and more. The text is the literary equivalent of the garden Dungy gradually coaxed into being: lively, messy, beset by invasive weeds, colorful, constantly changing, never quite under control, and endlessly interconnected. Some of the book is about the garden itself—the process of ripping up sod and putting down new earth only to have the wind attack it; the cherished birds who eat the seeds of the sunflowers and sometimes rip up their petals and leaves; and the plants themselves, whose names and evolution the author vivifies on the page. Other parts of the book are about tangential subjects: American bison, the early years of Dungy's marriage in California, the history of a garden in Virginia, the work of painter Mary Cassatt, and the murders of Black men by police. While the threads don’t always cohere neatly, they form a whole that reveals a remarkable mind in constant motion.
Sometimes thorny but deeply felt, fluidly written, and never boring.
[A] brilliant and beautiful memoir of [Dungy’s] deepening relationship with the earth that necessarily demands she consider questions of family, history, race, nation, and power. Soil demands we witness what erodes or frays or severs the stabilizing roots between us. Let us put our hands in and try to listen.”
New York Times bestselling author Ross Gay
In this quiet and far-ranging blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, poet Camille T. Dungy uses her small garden in Colorado to explore topics ranging from the isolation of parenting during Covid to the history of Black nature writing. Her narration, like her writing, is both careful and warm. In her prose and with her voice, she excels at drawing vivid pictures. It's impossible not to feel like you're right there with her, tending to native prairie grasses and harvesting baskets of colorful squash. This is a beautiful meditation on the complex web of human and nonhuman relationships that surround us, and a welcome addition to the growing canon of environmental literature that centers the knowledge and experiences of Black women. L.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
SEPTEMBER 2023 -- AudioFile