Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
Editor’s Note: Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice was published with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license. The e-book version is available as a free, accessible pdf via punctum books.
In my introductory remarks to this book review(s) supplement, I quote a line that is attributed to Audrey Hepburn: “Plant a garden and believe in tomorrow.” This quote is a guiding principle for me, thanks to my hero, Aunt Joan (aka poet, teacher, editor, and activist-scholar Joan Fallert). I recently shared this famous quote in a celebratory social media post acknowledging the commencement of Queer Pride Month 2024. I included the reflection, “‘Gardens’ can be literal and/or symbolic. Our bodyminds are gardens, are ecosystems.”
In the four main sections of Rituals for Climate Change—“The Call,” “The Listening,” “The Offering,” and “The Close”—Naomi Ortiz illuminates while wondering about patterns, cycles, and mycorrhizal symbolics via oh-so-many rituals. Indigenous, local wisdoms threaded through unique Crip syncretisms present themselves as poetry, prose, and spiritual guidance for ecological justice that is at once sensuous, heretical, and bold. Though not the first time an author has asserted that plants are speaking, that rocks are speaking, that the land is speaking, and that these and other “voices” are advancing a queer crip speech, Ortiz’s approaches are wholly her own while noting respected legacies both ancient and recent.
When I lived in Tucson, I remember saguaros’ “nurse trees” being personified oftentimes as “sacrificing” themselves, described uncritically as “mothers” who needed to die some day to prioritize their needy “children” as they matured. Mesquites and ironwoods were thus explained by (mostly male, usually white) naturalists as “giving up their lives” to “nourish” and “sustain” the young, vulnerable saguaros, as the latter grew—very slowly—and eventually laid down roots so extensively (to access water), their “nurse trees” or other-species “mothers” shriveled over time into dried husks, standing adjacent to (and later presumed dead beside) the growing, huge cacti. Naomi Ortiz offers a quite different narrative from this sexist, ableist, heteronormative, and sacrificial story that remains commonplace across botany, zoology, and geology, among other disciplines.
As Ortiz notes, for example, in “The Hunt,” “precipitation must sink or rise”… “it is hard not to recoil from that kind of love / even as we ask for more and more / and more.” While we might “recoil,” the precipitation is doing what it must. The levels, types, and severity of globalized and localized precipitation have of course been influenced significantly by climate change and ecological crises that have often been torrentially caused (and, indeed, otherwise precipitated) by people.
Who is this “speaker” (a question all-too-often posed of or directed toward poets)? Where is this speaker’s “place in zero waste”? This question about “place” is underscored in “Ode to Plastic Cups.” Questions about and reflections on the centrality of place are vibrant in this book. Sometimes, place, and its nonhuman inhabitants, is / are the “speaker(s).”
Like their differently, often-demonized cousins—the plastic straws—plastic cups are not without complexity. They must be understood as a necessary part of some folx’s crip sensibility, solvency, and survival. As the poet reflects, the cups are: “just what works for my body.” She continues: “call it an accommodation / this need for plastic cups / As disabled person / independence is precarious / daily life and reason / constructed upon a wobbly set of Crip hacks / get me from can’t to good enough” (italics in original). Here and elsewhere, Ortiz critiques, refuses, and undermines the socially violent binary that persists between environmental sustainability discourses and Crip rights narratives, offering us something far more nuanced, riskier, and, yes, truer than the distortions so often promulgated through ableism.
Five dispersed “interludes” offer differently rich palettes than the verse-infused poetics. These interludes spread seeds, grow through and into the other poems, are mutually imbricating and branching. Curiously yet unsurprisingly, these processes work bidirectionally, as the poems seem to water the interludes.
In “Ceremony is Unsettling,” a combination approach between an interlude and a verse-poem, Ortiz remarks on her childhood, during which she “did not understand the immense privilege of living near land that has never been plowed over or stripped away.” The “strange consequence of this climate change dread” is emphasized here and throughout the book. However, the genuine feeling of “dread” is addressed so thoroughly via a multiplicity of simultaneous interventions, the dread, while ever-present, need not have primacy.
Refuge, sanctuary, healing, and love are insisted upon, repeatedly, in Ortiz’s work. Ceremony is primary in the text. Ceremony “is” multiple and various, as shown via the titles of yet another interlocutory and embedded form, since “Ceremony Is Unsettling” is part of its own “kind” of poetics—and I hesitate to name this a form, a series, a sequence, or even a “kind,” since the book just does not read that way, at all, at least not to or for me.
Throughout, readers are shown how: “Ceremony is Medicine,” “Ceremony Traces the Root,” Ceremony Is Connection,” “Ceremony Is Confrontation,” “Ceremony Is Movement.” The capital I in the instances of “Is” in these titles is hardly incidental. The poems are deep deliberations, assertions; they are definitive, and live in a symphonic symbiosis with several other “forms”—again, I am hard pressed to call anything in this book of ritual(s) a “kind,” or a “form,” unless that means or denotes a kind or form of badass prayer.
These many kinds and forms are emergent and organic, macro-photographs of lichens, sand, raindrops in a monsoon, old stones, the expanse of a desert night sky. Among these, “Love as Refuge” has four “parts,” and “On this Side of the Line” has two. These works negotiate space within and between, hold each other (and, if we allow, us), and overtly question the borders, boundaries, and limits of lands, landscapes, and axes of difference geopolitically, interpersonally, and individually. Trauma, oppression, family history, trust, and many other serious and profound lifeway themes thread their networks in the book.
What comes through repeatedly, of course, is Ortiz’s insistent, kind, resonant, and mellifluous voice, in language both deeply local and vast. Some of my favorite examples include: “I bring laughter to drench brittlebush sunbeam petals” (“Adaptogen Rituals”); “Lightning kisses spark bursts of joy” (“Storm Procession”); and “Jolt of grace / accompanies / harmonic motion / loosens control” (“Devotional”).
Yes, “Witnessing is Grief Work,” and Ortiz knows how to bear witness without patronizing the reader or anyone else. Witnessing, she says is “deep heart work,” “shattering open spirit work,” “despair work,” and it is “to touch vulnerability,” among other ethical, artistic responsibilities. “Witnessing is prayer work,” it is “compassionate clarity,” and, vibrantly and vitally, it “is action.” We must “preserve testimony,” and ask questions, as Ortiz does so well at the conclusion of this piece and throughout the book (and—again and again—in all of her work).
Ortiz asks herself and wants to “try to answer,” as she likewise wants us to “try to answer” (that is: offering our own attempts at / toward answering, in ongoing consideration, in continuing questioning): “How am I supporting what is collectively being requested? What am I asking for within my own communities? What do I feel called to do from my intuition, from the universe? How am I continuing to listen? To witness?” I have had the joyous honor and opportunity to converse at length with Naomi, including in-real-time typed text and via livestream video. We have considered many questions during our conversations.
I loved learning from Naomi, as she notes, “When I need courage, I draw plants.” This is the first line of “Ritual for Courage,” the penultimate line of which is the iconoclastic Ortizian phrasing, “A practice to learn the secrets behind a name.”
As we continue the necessary “crip struggle for ecojustice,” we would be wise to listen—in all of the variegated ways we could open our hearts to define and understand the meanings of “listen”—to Naomi Ortiz:
In the desert, I listen, plants speak
In the desert, I observe
plants show how to survive(from “Rise of Mutual Attention”)
Title: Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice
Author: Naomi Ortiz
Publisher: 3Ecologies Books/Immediations, an imprint of punctum books
Year: 2023
Read Diane’s interview with Naomi Ortiz in the Winter 2023-2024 issue of Wordgathering.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Volume 17, Issue 2s – Spring 2024
About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.