Scalar Derangements: Teaching Evelyn Reilly’s ‘Styrofoam’

This essay argues that one of the key objectives of teaching Anthropocene literature is an appreciation of the irreducible complexity of our planetary condition. Somewhat counterintuitively, it is poetry, rather than narrative literature, that holds a lot of promise for conveying such an appreciation to students. Drawing on an MA course on American literatures of the Anthropocene taught in a comparative literature program, this essay develops a reading of Evelyn Reilly’s 2009 collection Styrofoam to illustrate how it affords classroom discussion of different forms of complexity and difficulty. A work of ecopoetics, Styrofoam showcases many kinds of intertextual and formal complexity that lend themselves quite well to elaboration in the classroom. Especially salient is the dimension of scale. One of the most discussed topics in the study of Anthropocene literature, scale is often invoked as central to human experience in an age of planetary derangement. The sustained focus on the minutiae of language that difficult works of poetry demand, this essay argues, adds a dimension of scalar complexity that is less easily activated in the narrative forms which most Anthropocene literary studies privilege.