Into the Into of Earth Itself

Astonished, dumbfounded, horrified, and agape at this symphonic opus which documents two sites of ecological disaster: Centralia, PA, a bulldozed near-ghost town where a coal mine fire has been burning underground since 1962, and Palmerton, PA, just an hour away, “one of the largest Superfund sites of the east, home” to the speaker. With Muriel Rukeyser an ancestral energy behind it, Into the Into of Earth Itself also nods to the documentary poetics of Layli Long Soldier and Anthony Cody, the personal-political confrontations of Solmaz Sharif, the syntaxes of Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Travesty Generator, jos charles’ feeld, and Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary. Amanda Hodes singularly emerges with her own alchemical lyric of excavation that exposes the corporate exploitation of land, exploitative (and dangerous) “dark tourism,” and the extracted innocence of girls. The book aptly quotes ecofeminist scholar Vandana Shiva: this is “a culture of rape–rape of the Earth, of local self-reliant economies, of women.” Here, the mined corpus is that of the exploiters, of exploitation itself. This is a searing indictment for our times. –Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures and Ghost Of

Into the Into of Earth Itself is a habitat, a survey, and a sculpture rendered by the brilliant and original multimedia artist Amanda Hodes. Her work is always immersive and meticulously researched, and this work of documentary poetry draws on every register available to a poet to tell the stories of both ecological and private wounds caused by environmental catastrophe. The book is dense with original forms that evoke the precarious experiences of people living in the liminal spaces of extractive industry and damaged ecosystems. –Carmen Giménez, author of Be Recorder

Amanda Hodes is a writer and new media artist. Her book Into the Into of Earth Itself won the 2024 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in FENCE, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, and the Academy of American Poets (online), among others. She currently teaches creative writing at Oberlin College & Conservatory. Her new media work and audio installations have been exhibited in venues such as the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Hirshhorn Sound Scene Festival, and Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology.

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