J. Maak – ecopoetry
J. Maak is a writer, educator and community-builder in Los Angeles. Her ecopoetry centers climate change and The Great Turning — what we’re observing, what it feels like to navigate these massive shifts, and the beautiful potential that lies ahead, if we choose to reach for it.
Why “Maak”? Watch for the poem “Màk” (coming soon on the Tiny Seed Literary Journal blog)
I was more suspicious of nature poetry because … it tended to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat. And it wasn’t talking about how the bird, often a bird which had arrived recently from somewhere else, interacted with and changed the larger system of this small part of the world …. And then I realized that what I was looking for all along was in the tradition of ecopoetics — a poetics full of systemic analysis that questions the divisions between nature and culture …
— Juliana Spahr, Well Then There Now (2011)
Publications
J. Maak’s poetry appears in the following publications:
- “A real-life ability to see thestrals”appeared in “Changing Skies,” Hindsight Journal (University of Colorado Boulder).
- “Built for the birds” appeared in “Plant People, An Anthology of Environmental Artists Vol. 2,” Plants and Poetry Journal.
- “Call it off before the divorce is final” appeared in Issue 13, Wild Roof Journal.
- “Falling to compost” appeared in “Gravity’s Grave Vol. 2 The World Beneath Our Feet,” Plants and Poetry Journal.
- “Gifts from the Seeds” appeared in “Seeds,” Tiny Seed Literary Journal.
- “Graveyard keep out” is forthcoming in Nightmare Melodies anthology, Wingless Dreamer Publications.
- “Have you listened to wildfire” appeared in “Changing Skies,” Hindsight Journal (University of Colorado Boulder).
- “I speak for the trees” appeared in “Gravity’s Grave Vol. 2 The World Beneath Our Feet,” Plants and Poetry Journal.
- “Just throw it Away” appeared in Issue 16, Pomona Valley Review.
- “Let’s play on monkey bars instead” is forthcoming in Issue 20, Wild Roof Journal.
- “Mak” is forthcoming on the Tiny Seed Literary Journal’s blog, and in Poetry of the Wild Flowers Anthology, Tiny Seed Literary Journal.
- “My mountains burn” appeared in Issue 16, Pomona Valley Review.
- “Ode to the myco-miracle” appeared in “My Core Rises,” Plants and Poetry Journal.
- “On collective wing” appeared in Issue 17, Wild Roof Journal.
- “Rights which settle accounts on corporate balance sheets but can never make us whole” appeared in “A Poetics of Rights,” Plumwood Mountain Journal.
- “Sequestration” appeared in “Gravity’s Grave Vol. 2 The World Beneath Our Feet,” Plants and Poetry Journal.
- “Unseen” appeared in “My Core Rises,” Plants and Poetry Journal.
- “What looks like perfect peach” appeared in the “Plant Your Words Anthology” and on the Tiny Seed Journal blog.
On this site:
- “Call it off before the divorce is final”
- “Re-member“
- “Ignore-ance”
- “Ode to the Myco-miracle”
- “Resurgence”
- “Sorting”
- “Still the airport”
- “Unseen”
- all available poems by J. Maak
Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
–Audre Lorde
Keep in touch
Want more? J. Maak’s poetry is released to this blog on a monthly basis. Subscribe to her newsletter to receive poetry delivered to your email, as well as notification as her poetry is published in literary journals.
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