For Those of Us Who Live at the Shoreline

Taking the first line of Audre Lorde’s poem, “A Litany for Survival,” this work explores the relationship between the body, landscape, history, and memory. The topography is constructed by blending plant species that grow specifically at the coastline and function to both hold in and feed the soil. Species such as sea purslane, sea grape, manchineel, and mangroves are the keepers of boundary, constructing a kind of living archive as the root systems hold in the erosion of memory and time. They also protect, filter, and some even poison as they are a part of dynamic marginal ecosystems. For those of us who live at the shoreline, at the liminal spaces between subject and citizen, our survival is based on the crucial decisions of what we remain rooted in and what we know must wash away

Geography · Shore · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Computer Science · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Geology · Oceanography