Title: The “Unfamiliar Objects” in Marie Howe’s Poems and the Cultivation of Community Consciousness

Abstract: With her collection What the Earth Seemed to Say, the American poet Marie Howe was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The more than twenty newly included eco-themed poems in this volume mark a major shift in her creative trajectory. Departing from a lyric tradition that treats elements of nature as mere backdrop or imagery, Howe places the earth, animals, plants, and everyday objects on an equal footing with human beings, highlighting their irreducible strangeness and agency and thereby creating a lived landscape that is both intimately entangled and constantly tense. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s theory of “dark ecology,” this article focuses on the structures of co-presence—“you in me, and me in you”—in these poems, as well as on the multiple networks of coexistence among humans, the earth, other forms of life, and various “unfamiliar objects.” Through close readings of selected texts, it sketches an ecological ethical discourse distinct from redemptive narratives and fantasies of harmony, and demonstrates how contemporary poetry, amid global ecological crisis, offers aesthetic and intellectual resources for rethinking the relationship between humans and the world.

Keywords: Marie Howe, dark ecology, unfamiliar objects, community

Author: Haoran Chen, Associate Professor, College English Department, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.02.011