Jacob Schepers, Ugly Ground Swell Moss

 

Ugly ground, swell moss finds you worth keeping neat.

Ugly ground, swell moss knows of some face of you you cannot.

Ugly ground, swell moss wants you all to itself. To cover you until your

            surface area is its surface area.

Ugly ground, swell moss feels the cool of your touch. Offers itself as

            covering to benefit the both of you.

Ugly ground, swell moss wants you two to be exclusive. With your gray

            its green. Your steady its growth.

Notre Dame, Indiana-based poet, editor and scholar Jacob Schepers’ second full-length poetry title, following A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Buffalo NY: Outriders Poetry Project, 2024), is Ugly Ground Swell Moss (Spokane WA: Carbonation Press, 2026). Ugly Ground Swell Moss is a deeply-ambitious book-length project, purposefully considered and sketched-out as a kind of gestural monologue or book-length essay, one that accumulates, relying on long sentence-thoughts and structural repetitions, looping through a conversation in and around biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). To offer, quickly: Linnaeus is best known for his work in taxonomy—the science of identifying, naming and classifying organisms—with Levinas best known for his conversations around ethics, and how we are most responsible for ourselves in relation to others. What, then, are our responsibilities, Schepers inquires, to ourselves, in relation to our natural environment? The structure of this particular ecopoetic is incredibly unique, however similar the kinds of questions and explorations I’ve seen recently through a variety of poetry titles by British Columbia poets, specifically Vancouver poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s sometimes, forest (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026) [see my review of such here], Kelowna poet Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Delta poet Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here]. One might suggest that such a conversation, a thesis-via-the-lyric, becomes particularly curious to explore through this particular form, and one might wish to ask exactly what prompted Schepers to approach his material through this accumulative overlay, this loop, of the extended lyric sentence.

Across four numbered sections—“To Name,” “To Call,” “To Maim” and “To Cull”—with an afterword, the poem loops, perpetually returning to the beginning, returning to that “Ugly ground,” akin to Robert Kroetsch’s perpetually-begun sequence without end, or the repetitions of poets such as Sawako Nakayasu or the late Denver poet Noah Eli Gordon. The loops begin, almost slow at the offset, allowing the anchor of that opening phrase to swirl the stretch of his thought-line well beyond the boundaries of a normal page. Each section offers an opening salvo, “Taxonomy,” before the loops begin as self-contained pieces in sequence. “Taxonomy” opens the foundation of each section, each chapter, like a thesis. The first begins:

To limit is what’s to taxonomize. Taxonomy is what is to assume a

            specialized attempt, a knowledge of prescriptive meaning

            shaving off borders.

To clear it up, this isn’t a romance: no Petrarch calls to you.

Forget the lover: this dynamic exchange? There’s no winner, no call for a

            witness-takes-all. No, none of that.

Through the repetition, Schepers offers less a return to the beginning than a series of concentric circles, as each sentence-section returns to the beginning before stretching out again, furthering the narrative cohesion and accumulation. The looped phrase offers a grounding to such an expansive, gestural, lyric, set in a compact package. Or, as the author’s “Afterword,” “On Identity, Legacy, Ugly Thinking, and Ethical Endlessness” provides, to open:

            Ugly Ground Swell Moss is at its heart a philosophically poetic project that spins around inquiry, obsession, relationality, ontology, and the epistemological questions that derive from such foundations. That sounds busy, I know, so consider all of that as the equivalent of holding a diamond up to a light source to see the various facets, reflections, and dispersions that can all be present in order to scrutinize as many details as possible to get a clearer sense of the whole thing. I am no systematic philosopher. I much prefer the lateral thinking that poetic processes depend on and thrive within. I’m grateful for big questions and for the relief of not having to answer them definitively.
            Resembling, on the one hand, a collection of odes in their insistence on apostrophe, and, on the other hand, a sonnet sequence due to their cumulative effect and twisted incantatory syntax and voice, the text of Ugly Ground Swell Moss explores the identities and relationships of the two title characters within a sparse ecosystem of longing and allegorical desire. This collection interrupts the centrally questioned relationship with tangential epigraphs and so-called “Taxonomies” that draw on the 18^th-century work and ensuring controversial legacy of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and the 20^th-century’s Lithuanian-born, French philosopher of Jewish heritage named Emmanuel Levinas. To varying degrees, I confront each of these thinkers’ afterlives in intellectual history—more on this below—and consider them within the ongoing discourse around lyric subjectivity, rhetoric, and ethics. All the while, there is shifting away from an exclusively anthropocentric viewpoint and towards the nonhuman ecology beneath our footing.