By Sarah Montin
What happens when war and environmental catastrophe are no longer considered separately? Published in May 2026 and co-edited by poets Teresa Mei Chuc, Anne Coray, and J. C. Todd, Convergence, Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War responds by bringing together war poetry and ecopoetry in the first anthology of its kind. At a moment when armed conflict and ecological devastation are increasingly experienced as interconnected realities rather than discrete crises, this publication appears particularly timely and necessary.
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The choice of the striking, single Latinate word “convergence” for the anthology’s title serves to counteract the widely-used and euphemistic “collateral”, often applied to environmental degradation in military context. Bringing to mind the French militant concept “convergence des luttes” (“the convergence of struggles”), the title invites us to adopt a non-human perspective as ecological and military crises converge. However, as Anne Coray warns in her introduction – “our intent in this anthology is not to minimize the human toll of war but to expand the dialogue” (p. xv) –, the focus on environmental damage does not set aside the human devastation of war: it only seeks to amplify it by redirecting the reader’s gaze. Quite understandably, the tradition of war writing has engaged almost exclusively with representing the human experience and cost of war, sidelining the environment, most often represented as an omnipresent but invisible backdrop to human suffering…
Close Encounters in War 