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Mia Alafaireet, Do Not Separate Her from Her Garden: Anne Spencer’s Ecopoetics. By Carlyn Ena Ferrari, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2024;, isae010, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isae010
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Carlyn Ena Ferrari’s Do Not Separate Her from Her Garden is a long-overdue reassessment of Anne Spencer’s work as a poet-gardener and activist of the New Negro movement. Reading against the surprisingly small body of scholarship on Spencer, much of which interprets her garden and gardening poetry as apolitical escapes from racialized experience or as symbolic representations of racial themes, Ferrari recalibrates the critical conversation on Spencer around the central maxim “do not separate her from her garden.” Building on scholarship that reads Spencer’s garden as emblematic of her life as a Black woman, Ferrari reads the garden as “an extension” of Spencer herself (1). As she draws on varied dimensions of Spencer’s multimedia archive—including fragmented poems written on ephemera, correspondence, little-known prose writings, and Spencer’s restored garden in Virginia—Ferrari argues that Spencer’s ecopoetics “re-vision” nature as a site for mediating intersections among race, gender, and environment (11). Under Ferrari’s logic, Spencer transcends her narrow reputation as New Negro poet to become a “woman-writer-mother-wife-civil-rights-and-community activist-intellectual-librarian-environmentalist” (125).
