Description

University of Virginia Press, paperback

Publication Date: December 14, 2022

Publisher Marketing: Do Not Separate Her from Her Garden demonstrates how Anne Spencer utilized the natural world in innovative ways to express her Black womanhood, feminist politics, spirituality, and singular worldview. Employing ecopoetics as an analytical framework, Carlyn Ferrari recenters Spencer’s archive of ephemeral writings to cut to the core of her artistic ethos. Drawing primarily on unpublished, undated poetry and prose, this book represents a long overdue reassessment of an underappreciated literary figure. Not only does it resituate Spencer in the pantheon of American women of letters, but it uses her environmental credo to analyze works by Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dionne Brand, positioning ecocritical readings as a new site of analysis of Black women’s writings.