Focusing on a category of poems from the Modernist and contemporary periods which give agency to nonhuman beings and texts themselves, Sarah Bouttier puts form, often neglected within ecocriticism, at the center of the definition of ecopoetics. Grounding ecopoetics in posthumanist ontologies (new materialism, flat ontology and Latour’s work on agency), Bouttier explores how the poems collapse the human/nonhuman divide and re-instil wonder at the nonhuman world. By juxtaposing readings of Modernist poets such as D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore with contemporary poets such as Les Murray, Pattiann Rogers, Alice Oswald and Kathleen Jamie, the book provides fresh insight into well-known works and offers a new perspective on contemporary ecopoetry. “Through meticulous and sophisticated close readings, Sarah Bouttier's book demonstrates how poetry extends agency across human and nonhuman entities. Theorizing poems themselves as nonhuman creaturely agents, it makes a compelling case for poetry's crucial relevance for ecological thought.” ―Pieter Vermeulen, Professor of American and Comparative Literature, KU Leuven, Belgium Sarah Bouttier is an Assistant Professor at Ecole Polytechnique, France. Richard Kerridge is a nature writer and ecocritic who leads the MA in Creative Writing and co-ordinates research and postgraduate studies in English Literature and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, UK. His works include: Cold Blood: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians (2014), J. H. Prynne's place-based poem-sequence The Oval Window, in collaboration with the late N. H. Reeve (2018), Writing the Enviornment (1998) and his other nature writing has been broadcast and published in BBC Wildlife, Poetry Review and Granta. He was awarded the 2012 Roger Deakin Prize by the Society of Authors, and has twice received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing. He was founding Chair of ASLE-UKI and has been an elected member of the ASLE Executive Council. With Greg Garrard he is co-editor of the Bloomsbury Academic series 'Environmental Cultures' – the first series of monographs in the Environmental Humanities to be published in Britain and he is a member of the steering committee of New Networks for Nature. Greg Garrard is Associate Professor of Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of the bestselling book Ecocriticism (2nd edition, 2011) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014).