Ecopoetics Along Shorelines

When Dominic Johnson links the work of Herko with that of Jack Smith, we are shown the layers that are involved with “a politics of failure” (153). Within this, opposites like “pitiful and stoic, majestic and wretched, horrific and laughable” are put into conversation, generating an essence of both incandescence and the not-yet-here. If incandescent is “to regard…as a lost object that provides an anticipatory illumination of another world” (153), the not-yet-here acts as this other-dimension that faces the possibility of resurgence (149). The politics of failure, failure, opens a realm of potential that queer culture is unapologetic for inhabiting.