SOIL

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.