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Into the Into of Earth Itself

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ISBN: 9781625572202
Catalog: Black Lawrence Press
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Categories Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, Poetry

Into the Into of Earth Itself

Amanda Hodes

Publication Date: September 15, 2026

Description

Winner of the 2024 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

Selected by judge Diana Khoi Nguyen, Into the Into of Earth Itself is the debut collection by Amanda Hodes. The poems investigate the dual histories of two Pennsylvania towns: Palmerton and the nearby ghost town of Centralia, which was condemned due to an underground mine fire that will burn for centuries.

Through text mining, these poems excavate legislation, archival material, web comments, and even the Silent Hill screenplay, revealing the inextricable nature of environmental toxicity and toxic masculinity, the violation of the environment and violations of women. Human pollution is a “bug” in the code, prompting forms of material glitch—earthquakes, sinkholes, illness, and shame. Couched in code-like syntax, the collection cycles through an ecology of voices, from bacteria to pigeons to weeds, all the while exploring sexual assault and chronic illness, questioning what it truly means to be “natural” or “clean.”

Praise

Astonished, dumbfounded, horrified, and agape at this symphonic opus which documents two sites of ecological disaster: Centralia, PA, a bulldozed near-ghost town where a coal mine fire has been burning underground since 1962, and Palmerton, PA, just an hour away, “one of the largest Superfund sites of the east, home” to the speaker. With Muriel Rukeyser an ancestral energy behind it, Into the Into of Earth Itself also nods to the documentary poetics of Layli Long Soldier and Anthony Cody, the personal-political confrontations of Solmaz Sharif, the syntaxes of Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Travesty Generator, jos charles’ feeld, and Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary. Amanda Hodes singularly emerges with her own alchemical lyric of excavation that exposes the corporate exploitation of land, exploitative (and dangerous) “dark tourism,” and the extracted innocence of girls. The book aptly quotes ecofeminist scholar Vandana Shiva: this is “a culture of rape—rape of the Earth, of local self-reliant economies, of women.” Here, the mined corpus is that of the exploiters, of exploitation itself. This is a searing indictment for our times.
—Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures and Ghost Of

Into the Into of Earth Itself is a habitat, a survey, and a sculpture rendered by the brilliant and original multimedia artist Amanda Hodes. Her work is always immersive and meticulously researched, and this work of documentary poetry draws on every register available to a poet to tell the stories of both ecological and private wounds caused by environmental catastrophe. The book is dense with original forms that evoke the precarious experiences of people living in the liminal spaces of extractive industry and damaged ecosystems.
—Carmen Giménez, author of Be Recorder

About the Author

Amanda Hodes

Amanda Hodes is a writer and new media artist. Winner of the 2024 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, her book Into the Into of Earth Itself is forthcoming in 2026 from Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, [PANK], Pleiades, AMBIT, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Interim Poetics, DIAGRAM, Academy of American Poets (online), Quarterly West, and elsewhere. As an artist, she is interested in sound installation as a route to an embodied, spatial poetics. Her new media work has been exhibited in venues such as the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Torpedo Factory, Abington Arts Center, Hirshhorn Sound Scene Festival, Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology, AUDIRE, University of Kent, and Dartington International Music Festival. She currently teaches creative writing at Oberlin College & Conservatory.

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Winner of the 2024 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

Selected by judge Diana Khoi Nguyen, Into the Into of Earth Itself is the debut collection by Amanda Hodes. The poems investigate the dual histories of two Pennsylvania towns: Palmerton and the nearby ghost town of Centralia, which was condemned due to an underground mine fire that will burn for centuries.

Through text mining, these poems excavate legislation, archival material, web comments, and even the Silent Hill screenplay, revealing the inextricable nature of environmental toxicity and toxic masculinity, the violation of the environment and violations of women. Human pollution is a “bug” in the code, prompting forms of material glitch—earthquakes, sinkholes, illness, and shame. Couched in code-like syntax, the collection cycles through an ecology of voices, from bacteria to pigeons to weeds, all the while exploring sexual assault and chronic illness, questioning what it truly means to be “natural” or “clean.”"
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