Inner Forest Service

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Inner Forest Service publishes poems attentive to the earth, what we're doing to it, and what that does to us.  Letting four years pass between issues ideally allows the journal to more legibly take the pulse of poets and the earth and reflect any changes.  This poetry journal encourages us to feed from our being of the natural world and act according to its biotic riot.  It aims to assist in coalition building between various ways of writing about the environment, including those suspicious of the word nature.  For example, both ecopoetic critique and transcendental nature worship are welcome.  We value activists, renunciants, and hopeless optimists.  We include poems of total despair—while believing despair to be an excessive inner emission that traps in light's heat, a psychological greenhouse gas that poetry can help dissipate.  Robin Wall Kimmerer names our utmost ambition: "As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us."

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The climate crisis increases environmental and interdependent attention that can expand poetic forms of awareness: a feel for where the world overlaps into patterns, metaphors, rhythms, and assonance and thus erodes and nourishes itself.  Simply by using poetry's tools, even poems without a single line about the natural world can inadvertently align one with widening recognitions of habitat.  To frequently read the imaginative, the metaphoric, the philosophic, and the lyrical engages more of our mental/bodily attributes, our inner traces of the outer, our constant porosity, which can further awaken one to an ecological grounding of identity.  To place the earth at the center of our reading pulls us back together all the more.

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