Cassandra Laity, University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2025)

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the impact of H.D.’s materialization of queer desire in Sea Garden as it pertains to H.D.’s queer trope of the non-fertile, grotesque rock flower that she synchronizes with real geological processes to produce what I term a queer geo-ecology. Theoretically, the text draws on Karen Barad’s theory of “intra-action” in which processual histories and human concepts—of which the non-fertile trope of queer womanhood is one—emerge intra-actively in and through one another. Part I examines H.D. and Bishop’s intra-active floral crystals of queer becoming, while part II explores Elizabeth Bishop’s use of Sea Garden as a geo-ecology to launch a specific protest against Cold War McCarthyism and nuclear world destruction. With an eye toward Barad’s material realism, this essay reads H.D.’s becoming with nature’s emergent rock sphere against Bishop’s poetics of belonging, queer intimacy, and political protest.