The Sanity of Earth and Grass brings together over a hundred poems, thirty-one of them never before published, by a remarkable American poet. A gregarious person who loved and celebrated human bonds, Winner also drew strength from nature, and his poems glow with sensual pleasure and confrontation. As he says in On Lexington Avenue, What I like is smell . . . the enormous kindness of sensation. At the same time, and without self-pity, he probes graphically and at unusual depth the violence, deprivation, and injustice that are part of so many lives.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. —Walt Whitman, from “This Compost” How did Whitman use language to figure out his relationship to the earth, and how can we interpret his language to reconstruct the interplay between the poet and his sociopolitical and environmental world? In this first book-length study of Whitman’s poetry from an ecocritical perspective, Jimmie Killingsworth takes ecocriticism one step further into ecopoetics to reconsider both Whitman’s language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and the world through a close study of Whitman’s language. Killingsworth contends that Whitman’s poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology and that an ecopoetic perspective can explicate Whitman’s feelings about his aging body, his war-torn nation, and the increasing stress on the American environment both inside and outside the urban world. He begins with a close reading of “This Compost”—Whitman’s greatest contribution to the literature of ecology,” from the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. He then explores personification and nature as object, as resource, and as spirit and examines manifest destiny and the globalizing impulse behind Leaves of Grass, then moves the other way, toward Whitman’s regional, even local appeal—demonstrating that he remained an island poet even as he became America’s first urban poet. After considering Whitman as an urbanizing poet, he shows how, in his final writings, Whitman tried to renew his earlier connection to nature. Walt Whitman and the Earth reveals Whitman as a powerfully creative experimental poet and a representative figure in American culture whose struggles and impulses previewed our lives today.

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) has been active in the United States officially since 1997, causing more than $45 million in damages to various entities. As the organization continues to grow and expand its range of targets, ELF has taken an extreme position against individuals, corporations, and governments that, in the organization's view, places monetary gain ahead of the natural environment. Rejecting state sanctioned means of legal protest, ELF uses economic sabotage to inflict financial suffering on those deemed objectionable. In February 2002, the FBI listed the ELF as the largest and most active US-based terrorist group. Although no one has died in any of these operations, ELF's campaign against loggers, SUV dealerships, and others it considers threats to the planet have galvanized and polarized the environmental movement. Former ELF spokesperson Rosebraugh charts the history and ideology of ELF and explores their tactics, successes, and limitations. He shows how ELFers offer an uncompromising vision of an earth under assault from the forces of greed and corporate violence, and how they employ direct action against those they deem a threat to the planet. Rosebraugh also examines the issues of whether violence is or is not justifiable, and the short- and long-term political benefits and drawbacks of using violence. Finally, he offers a trenchant vision of the future of the environmental movement, radical politics, and US democracy under the so-called Patriot Act. Whatever your view of direct action or violence, Burning Rage of a Dying Planet is essential reading for those trying to understand the mindset and motivations of contemporary radical environmentalists.