This new book–400-some pages of poems selected by Melissa Tuckey–fuses social justice with the more-than-human. It’s an awkward term, I know, more-than-human, but it seems to me to be the best way to refer to the persons with whom we share Earth who are not Homo sapiens–Carolina wrens, say, or maple trees. Social justice was once an awkward term too.

Melissa Tuckey selected my poem “Detroit” for section three, “Little Farm, Big Farm: Food, Cuture, and Capital.” I was happy she put it there. I wrote “Detroit” a number of years ago when I was thinking about the ways in which food–growing it, selling it, preparing it, sharing it–seems like an obvious place for humans to come together and surmount the mess we’ve made. I was also thinking about some of the comments I’d heard from urban farmers, including one who was just twelve years old. From working in a community garden, he had already learned that “asphalt isn’t forever.”

I hope you’ll buy a copy of Ghost Fishing for yourself and for a friend or two. It would make for superb hammock reading.

My poem”Detroit”–read it here–was originally selected for the Michigan Poets Broadside Series by Foster Neill and Jon Taylor. Thanks, both of you, and thanks, Melissa Tuckey, too.