A volume of poetry by noted biologist and ecologist Richard Stephen Felger is newly reborn after nearly half a century out of print. Originally a limited-edition chapbook of 200 hand-bound copies, Dark Horses and Little Turtles and Other Poems from the Anthropocene has been reissued by Tucson-based Polytropos Press in downloadable form. The 2020 digital edition includes several new works by Felger and a foreword by award-winning writer Sharman Apt Russell. It is available for purchase at www.polytropos.com.
The genesis of Dark Horses and Little Turtles is a story in itself. “As curator of botany at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, I made a number of trips to work on specimens at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and at the University of California Herbarium in Berkeley. My involvements with population and environment led to friendships with artists and scientists in the Bay Area and beyond,” Felger recalls. “It was heady times and we were protesting war and assaults on nature. John Brandi, Michael McClure, and Allen Ginsberg encouraged me to keep writing, which I did, although my primary focus has been botanical research.”
Poet-artist John Brandi saw in Richard Felger the kind of author he was seeking for Tooth of Time Press, an off-the-grid alternative press operated from his northern New Mexico cabin. Dark Horses and Little Turtles was one of the first publications to emerge from Brandi’s hand-cranked mimeograph machine in 1974. “The desert itself came alive the minute you opened the sand-colored 11 × 8 newsprint cover graced with Richard’s calligraphy and turtle-petroglyph line drawings,” Brandi says. “The 28-page interior contained poems, maps, a play, and fanciful drawings—pollywogs, river ripples, amoebic forms, turtles, bird-turtles, turtle-humanoids—all printed in brown ink.”
Richard Felger, a Silver City resident, has written or co-authored more than 100 peer-review publications in addition to books and numerous popular writings in botany, ethnobiology, new food crops, and other fields. Recent and forthcoming titles include Plants & Animals in the Yoeme World: Ethnoecology of the Yaquis of Sonora and Arizona with Felipe Silvestre Molina; The Desert Edge: Flora of the Guaymas–Yaqui Region of Sonora, Mexico with Susan Davis Carnahan, & José Jesús Sánchez-Escalante; and Trees of the Gila Forest, New Mexico with James Thomas Verrier, Kelly Kindscher, & Xavier Raj Herbst Khera.
For more information on Richard Felger and his work, see https://www.desertfoodplants.org/.