“You have to learn the language of how to communicate with the plants” and Other Selva Stories

Kristina Van Dexter is a poet–researcher whose writing focuses on the ecocidal destruction of forests and their own relational poetics of resistance, including narratives and political and ethical projects that emerge through human and nonhuman collaborations in forests’ relational worlds. Her experimental and poetic ethnographic research and projects involve relational practices of collaboration that are guided by and grow from forests themselves. Van Dexter is the founder of Paz con la Selva, a collective for an insurgent poetics in the defense of forests. She lives and works in Colombia (and Indonesia) where she is completing a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies. She is currently working on a collection of insurgent poetics that entangles ecological narratives of witness to forest destruction and the forests’ own poetics expressed through its diverse registers, temporal relations, and ceremonial encounters with forest spirits.