Aza Pace

My poems reach toward a feminist poetics of place. They ask what it means to write eco-poetry in a time of environmental disaster and how to write “nature poems” as a feminist woman-identifying poet. Often, they draw on Texas landscapes, including the plants and animals of East Texas and the coastal regions near Houston, and explore how human stories and experiences become intertwined with landscape. Many of my poems function as praise poems, using precise imagery and observation as a way of making the familiar strange and therefore more visible. They ask what we notice and pay reverence to, what we illuminate in the circle of our care. Poems, I would argue, can help foster reciprocal relationships with the non-human world because they have the potential to function in two directions at once: standing in wonder and bringing wonder about.