The Resilience of Vulnerability: Writing as Misreading, Inquiry, Process (and Failure) in the Ecopoetry of Orchid Tierney

Orchid Tierney’s ecopoetry is read as a poetics of vulnerability that offers a paradoxical response to the longue-durée environmental crisis of the Anthropocene. Focusing on a year of misreading the wildcats (2019) and looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (2023), the essay interprets Tierney’s acceptance and assumption of a condition of deviance, incapacity, insufficiency, hazard, failure, tentativeness as indicative of a will to dwell in a state, and feeling, of fragility. Thus, attention is turned to the mode of existence of tiny organisms, simultaneously parasitical and mutualistic; reading turns to the eloquent surfaces of things.