It may twist and turn, fall back on itself and start again, stumble over an infinite series of hindering rocks, but at last the river must answer the call to the sea. – Howard Thurman

In her debut collection, Unearth [The Flowers], Thea Matthews offers to the world a botanical garden in which each flower shines with the vision of healing. Grappling with issues such as child abuse, sexual assault, and racism in the United States, Matthews channels a voice which sounds both distinctly individual, yet powerfully communal through every poem.

Don’t we all have places to go like these? Wet
and stuffed with life, warm, not yet growing spots,

these great and hollowed grenades. I let myself coil in.
Like any good blanket that’s ever swaddled me safe,

The Great Plains of the United States have always signaled one thing to me: possibility. Growing up on flat lands, surrounded at all times by an unencumbered 360 degree view does nothing if not instill a sense of the possible.

Dear Emily, 

 

Congratulations on becoming Ecotheo's Social Justice editor!

My wife, Brenda, and I met as Peace Corps Volunteers in Brazil in the early 1970s and lived most of our adult life in that country. 

Catherine Coleman Flowers wrote Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret (The New Press) to call attention to how issues of sewage and wastewater are connected to rural poverty, infrastructural inequity, and systemic racism. Yet after reading the book, I thought a more accurate title might be a phrase Coleman uses on page sixty-three: My Education as an Activist.

We say, ”I will light a candle,”
as if the light will dissipate
the virus. We wear masks
to hike by
our beloved river.

I will speak the anguish of my spirit; I will complain
in the bitterness of my soul. —Job 7:11, NRSV


Even the lamentations are different now
multiplied
polyphonic

Fredando “Farmer Fredo” Jackson is the Executive Director of Flint River Fresh, a nonprofit based in Albany, Georgia. The mission of the organization is “to increase access to fresh, local, affordable, healthy food for our neighbors, create new economic opportunities for local farmers, develop young people through agriculture, and conserve natural resources for future generations.”