Поэт Джулиана Спарх получила Пулитцеровскую премию за сборник о климатическом кризисе и экологической катастрофе

It is 2026, and coral reefs bleach into decay. Hurricanes howl along coastlines, ripping up trees and entire communities by the root. Data centers guzzle liters of water by the billions each year amid a so-called “global water bankruptcy.” In a state of perpetual ecological grief, Juliana Spahr writes poetry — and then writes poetry about what writing means. Spahr’s 2025 collection “Ars Poeticas,” which translates from Latin to “the art of poetry,” won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for its honest wrestling with political and moral disillusionment. Poet, critic, essayist and Northeastern professor of contemporary American literature, Spahr refuses to shy away from political realities. She charges her work with scathing commentary on authoritarianism, war, police brutality and environmental devastation, all the while wondering: “What does poetry do in these moments?” Spahr told Northeastern Global News last year. “What role does it have in this moment of ecological crisis?” Although the answer is nuanced, it certainly begins with unburrowing from the sand to name atrocities, and Spahr’s poetry does so at a relentless pace. Ars Poetica 1, “coral,” begins with a sickening ascension, describing the fall of the largest nuclear device ever detonated by the United States at Castle Bravo in reverse. Radiation and rubble swirl together in a dizzying display; you can practically hear the frantic scratch of Spahr’s pencil, simply attempting “to write poetry after that.” In “coral,” the entire “slime earth” to the microscopic planes of a sea urchin’s “tube feet” shift slowly but, in a burst of light, are decimated. Nuclear warfare and the Cold War serve as a striking vehicle for examining the deceptive slowness of violence. Although the ocean laps against the shore throughout the poem, cruelty simmers on the water’s surface. Perhaps the harm appears minimal, or that the spectacular detonation is in the past, but the violence of climate change reproduces itself, always seeping into the present beauty of the natural world. Suspended in all this blinding destruction, Spahr has not yet caught up with the speed of coordinated attacks nor the quiet devastation that follows. But she is demanding specificity. She is taking stock. After the manic expulsion of “coral,” “scotch, broom,” the longest poem in the book, with 22 pages, begins with an exhale. Initially arranged in couplets of iambic pentameter, the speaker crawls wounded toward meaning, turning to the rule-breaking poets that preceded her to unlearn said “rules.” Citing (and reproducing her own) 11-syllable iambic lines experimented with by 17th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud and 20th-century French-Caribbean poet and playwright Aimé Fernand Césaire, Spahr writes, “The poem, I understood, had rules and then / more rules, so many that the result was no / rules mattered that much finally.” Césaire proved such poetic boundlessness when he coined the word “verrition,” based on the Latin verb “verrō,” meaning “to sweep, scrape away or scour.” Reading his poetry necessitates physically sweeping one’s tongue, while the very language probes the mind for new possibilities, wiping clean a slate muddied by colonization. In turn, Spahr is both longing for poetry that roams while roaming herself, imagining a poem “as an / opening, a cracked window maybe, or a / hole in the wall, something I could shimmy through.” Spahr fastens the wilderness of atypical thinking to all the great unknowable forces in nature, recognizing human entanglement with all life, “this throat and this galaxy and all that / it held in between… A poem.” In this togetherness, binaries dissolve. For Spahr, there is no distinction between “political” and “apolitical” poetry; there are no such easy distinctions between the mind, the world and the way we survive in it. Transitioning abruptly from breathy couplets to heavy paragraphs, Spahr grounds readers in a time and place — the 2017 Berkeley, Calif. protests, “a time of sticks, not of poems” and “a time when I could no longer tell what was comedy, what was farce, what was merely a meme.” The speaker watches via Twitter as federal agents arrest a man “who brought a leaf blower to a protest so as to blow back the endless teargas.” The pages of “scotch, broom” are choked with this tear gas — the words are elbowing each other for oxygen within the thick smoke of the column. For the speaker, hope was “oh so fleeting, oh so trivial in the face of the daily.” Perhaps it felt that way partly because, as the speaker admits, “I no longer understood the poem, the poetry,” or simply “how to sing in these dark times.” As she reads plays by Bertolt Brecht, a 20th-century leftist German playwright, the image of a woman in bed with a book too large to hold, thinking about the present catastrophe as she loses her faith in poetry, is crushing. But couplets cut through the dense fog, and a musical wind picks up — literally, opening with: “That day as the breeze blew and the beer we drank / was vibrant, bubbly, and we were delighted.” The smoke and breeze mirror each other as both metaphor and poetic forms, moving between couplets and dense, foggy paragraphs just as “the part of / us that loves moon, poetry, trill, laughter is / the same part of what is ever so wrong with / us.” After all, “scotch, broom” is an invasive plant, poisonous to grasslands, forests and the wild animals that ingest it. And yet, it is also a small, yellow flower, a life form that is learning how to survive climate change along with the rest of us. It “can withstand cement dust and fumes from coal tar operations as well as resist ozone exposure.” It seems an apt metaphor for all the contradictions of humanity, capable of immense cruelty and equally immense love. The breeze struggles at the jagged edges of a stanza-less Ars Poetica 3, “bluebird ghost.” Lines break off halfway across the page, like the leaf-blower beating back hopelessness, opening with a cautious appreciation for “the sun’s late-day glimmer,” and “that belief that a poem can meaningfully / insist that someone take a moment and / just bother with beauty.” The speaker asks Horace, the Roman lyric poet who coined the term “Ars Poetica,” how to “tell a tragic tale, this tragic tale,” picking up couplets once again, “counting syllables as your index / fingers drum out an elusive beat / on your wooden desktop.” The windy rhythm of iambic pentameter, which gusts, falls flat, then re-gathers throughout the collection, can be read as a metaphor for the status of her faith in writing itself, a process which the poet examines in real-time. As the sound washes over the reader, Spahr toils and knocks each syllable into existence. The togetherness is potent, the escape tangible — until the wind dies and scatters to despair. Still, the wind will return. The following sections, “bison” and “goby,” lament the climate crisis in odes to their titular animals. It describes prairie bison that are “always full of life, even when dying” and the goby fish’s world, threatened unless capitalism itself comes to an end, “an idea that feels impossible / to include in a poem tells us something / about the new feats of imagining we / have yet to embrace.” The speaker compares herself to Grendel, the beastly antagonist of the Old English epic “Beowulf” “wandering the outskirts of town, angry, unforgiving of those who still find happiness amidst such gut-wrenching loss.” After traversing prairies, oceans, islands, battlegrounds and farmers’ markets, Spahr returns to the reef with the final Ars Poetica, “coral, again.” Perhaps all of these weaving, contradictory emotions — the disillusionment, the rage, the ecstasy, the hope — are felt in this one particular place. After all, “Is it not all here, in a story retold so many times? / Is it not all we need to know about how hard / it is for us to go forward? / And also all the ways possible?” Perhaps that is the role of poetry in times like these — to contain it all.