Outside Inside

Abstract

Through the proliferation of plastics, and chemical pollution more generally, petrochemicals constitute forms of social, material, and biological writing. How might contemporary writers respond to the capacity of petrochemical hyperobjects to influence social formations or alter human metabolism? This selection of poems is an attempt to work within a necessarily expanded notion of what constitutes reading and writing in the Anthropocene. Incorporating the results of biomonitoring tests for phthalates on the author's own urine, the poems consider the “metabolic poetics” of endocrine disrupting chemicals. By focusing on the “outside” that is “inside,” the poems draw attention to the coextensive and intra-active nature of the body with its environment and the consequent implications for linking the human to the nonhuman and the personal to the global in environmental ethics.