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Soil
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden | Camille T Dungy
6 posts | 5 read | 12 to read
A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage. In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it. Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.
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bnp
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Current reads, one fits #NaturalLitsy.

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Floresj
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Pickpick

This was mostly about a black mother‘s garden in Fort Collins, CO. However, it was also about being a mother during remote learning and COVID, being black and living in Fort Collins/US, environmental practices, and neighbors told eloquently by a poet.

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Chelsea.Poole
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Pickpick

I am so so inspired by this book!! Nature writing from a mother of a young girl, a lovely perspective. Dungy is also a wife, professor and black woman living in the suburbs of Fort Collins, Colorado. She takes the reader along with her as she creates a native landscape, establishing a space for plants and animals. Along the way, Dungy explores the racial issues which have historically and currently plague America. And awesome audiobook! Loved it!

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merelybookish
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Pickpick

A beautiful memoir about the garden Dungy has created in the yard of her Fort Collins home. She describes how she built it, what she's planted & challenges she's faced. Through her garden, Dungy also explores Black joy, climate change, colonialism, and racism. She claims nature writing as a genre that belongs to working people, mothers, and Black people. You don't have to be a gardener to enjoy this book, but it probably helps. 🌱🌻🌾 #netgalley

Tamra Incredible cover art! 1y
sarahbarnes This sounds interesting! 1y
merelybookish @Tamra Indeed! It has pictures inside too. 1y
merelybookish @sarahbarnes She lives in Fort Collins and the book is set between 2019-2020. So I recognized some of the plants and weather events she mentions. (Eg snow a few days after Labor Day.? 1y
62 likes4 stack adds4 comments
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lahousewyfe
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Pickpick

Dungy invites us into her garden, and from there to explore the world that surrounds us. She mirrors our society and history with the essential messiness of gardening, embracing the struggle and the beauty that lies there. An inclusive and lyrical read that I recommend to gardeners of the soil and the mind. I received this book from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

IuliaC Great review and what a lovely cover! 2y
TheKidUpstairs I just learned about this book last night, it sounds so good! 2y
Amiable What a gorgeous cover! 2y
22 likes1 stack add3 comments