Abstract
Within the vast body of poetry written by José Emilio Pacheco (Mexico, 1939-2014), there is a clear and profound engagement with environmental themes, such as the lives and experiences of non-human animals and the effects of pollution on natural environments. In this essay, I examine a series of Pacheco’s poems that reflect on the production of trash and the act of disposal. Through his consideration of the waste that humans produce, Pacheco manages to draw our attention to the centrality of garbage as a socio-material element that mediates relationships between humans and the more-than-human environment. By reading Pacheco’s poetry through the lens of waste and disposal, I argue that the trash is his work throws in relief three central concerns of contemporary ecological thought: 1) the difficulty of squaring Western, anthropocentric notions of time with planetary timescales; 2) the uneven exposure of certain bodies to varying levels of toxicity; and 3) the vulnerability of humans in the face of ecological crisis. In this sense, I contend that Pacheco’s poetry constitutes a significant aesthetic contribution to our attempts to think through notions like the Anthropocene, which, in essence, elevates the waste produced by (certain) humans to the status of epoch-defining actor. In short, Pacheco’s poetry helps us channel our energy toward dealing with a world full of trash.