An Invitation to Collaborate

Materia Poetica invites us to extend our tendrils of curiosity into the intersections between bodies, languages, and medicines, broadly defined.

Medicines, as cultures of diagnosis and treatment, make full use of metaphor, translation, and interpretation.  They make meaning with, from, and upon bodies.  And bodies respond, transform, resist, and re-invent those meanings.

Poetics allow us to attend to the delicate processes where meaning evaporates and condenses, where hermeneutic rules for making interpretation extend into suggestions for shifting forms.  Embodied poetics implies a quality of presence and perception that softens existing ways of knowing and charts the arrival of something new, old shapes echoing inside new forms.  Poetics allows us to work with existing traditions even as we improvise upon them. Poetics allows us to transpose and traverse the body’s different scales, to shift awareness fluidly from individual bodies to social and ecological bodies.  Poetics allows us to move between language about the body, language from the body, and language as the body. (We are poems.)

We want to hear from practitioners and scholars whose work lives somewhere within the messy, fertile intersections of plant medicine, embodiment studies, trauma and healing, and movement towards the decolonization and liberation of individual and collective bodies. This may include herbalists, folk healers, body workers, activists and organizers – anyone whose work engages the poetics of the body and seeks to re-enchant our relationship with the living world.

We’re seeking to create a living, pulsing, tactile text, one less concerned with defending static truth claims than with standing present to moments of fraught, tangled, seductive emergence. We want writing that pricks the senses awake. Writing that extends and spills over the edges of evidence and energetics, that teaches us to align our practices and our medicine with our experience of a participatory, co-evolved cosmos. We want writing that reminds the body of its capacity to feel, to connect, to hunger, to reimagine and remake itself, to touch and be touched, to witness and be witnessed.  

We are accepting submissions of all forms - essays, poetry, case studies, interviews, herbal monographs, etc. - as well as those that blend, challenge, or reject conventions of form and genre.

If you're interested in dialogue to figure out how our work intersects, feel free to get in touch - we welcome those conversations as essential to shaping the text. We can be reached at sarah@materiapoetica.com and jojo@materiapoetica.com.

We are still accepting submissions as things roll and unfurl slowly. If you would like to have a conversation with us, please send an email.

Sarah and Jojo