Lyric Encounters with Other Places: Juliana Spahr's this connection of everyone with lungs and Robert Minhinnick's 'An Isotope Dreaming'

The chapter considers the work of Juliana Spahr and Robert Minhinnick. Their poetry has been productively approached as performing an ecological writing or ecopoetics. This discussion considers the relationship between lyricism and encounters with other places in their war poetry. For Spahr these encounters are with virtual places, mediated through information and newsgathering systems. Minhinnick's travelogue uses the conceit of radioactive dispersal as a way of foregrounding multiple transitions in his work. His lyric attempts a dissemination of self that can establish a sustainable reflection upon war. Ultimately, both poets' shared position of negotiating ideas of encounter in their poetry creates a lyric form that addresses war by focusing on processes of mobility, transition and inclusion.