When we think about fields, it is impossible not to think of both abundance and bleakness–the land is hospitable, glowing, a source of food and community. And yet, also a liminal space that’s all too easy to get lost in. Greens giving way to faded greys that still carry a certain warmth. To be lost in a field is to be undone by the source of your own nourishment, to realize that the resources made to keep you alive may actually not be entirely for you. The fascination this underscores is evident in EG Cunningham’s multimedia work, Field Notes.
Published in 2025 on River River Press, a publishing house founded three years ago with the intention of publishing experimental poetry titles, Field Notes is Cunningham’s fourth chapbook, joining three other projects with elements of ecopoetry. Cunningham’s poetry has been published in Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Nation, Poetry London, Southern Humanities Review, and more, and she also works as a musician and educator, bringing together numerous creative disciplines to share her ecologically minded message. Field Notes brings together many of the themes that define her career; she states in her bio that she takes a poetic interest in “exile, climate disaster, class, desire, and systems of power,” a description that perfectly describes this collection.
Field Notes begins with an admission that “this field wants for nothing. This field is felt,” a longing for the abundance mindset that the speaker associates with fields. Full of “an emerald want,” they experience both creative and destructive urges, consumed by their seemingly drab surroundings and the nostalgia they feel as a result–and this is only accentuated by the photos that populate the text. The photos are small, black-and-white, mainly focused on the plain expanse of a field–the grasses scraping the horizon, blurring together. Mirroring this, Cunningham concedes that “this field is not so idyllic—a four-block stretch of land linked by suburbia and traffic.” They go on to describe cemetery fields, a darker version of the initial beauty they depicted–and eventually admit that “childhood is a field in which we learn to construct fences.”
The idea that the personal is political may be a tired one, associated with the often exclusionary writings of second-wave feminism–yet, in Cunningham’s seemingly hyperspecific text, it becomes relevant all over again. Despite being themed around nature, this text is not solely ecopoetry, and Cunningham does not sanctimoniously call for climate action without emotional ties to the topic. Instead, in Field Notes, the field is not only a site of natural beauty but also a site of personal and emotional growth. It is childhood nostalgia, death and rebirth, a symbol of the suburban nuclear family and a harbinger of every future that can grow beyond it like the stray wildflower in an otherwise blank prairie. Thus, this collection has all the joys of ecopoetry without its singular focus, making environmentalism feel intertwined with the speaker’s emotional life.
Later in the text, Cunningham explores the idea of the field as a liminal space, one in which linear time loses some of its relevance: “On a red clay afternoon, rural Georgia sears that then / to now this.” They point to the “futurization of history,” to “doing battle with years,” to “wanting for forever”–to a constant straining against linearity, taking place on the backdrop of afield, bleak yet full of the possibility for growth and bounty and even care. Thus, Field Notes is not a coffee-table book full of photos of fields, nor is it an effusive poetry collection that unthinkingly worships nature; instead, it carries a nihilism that challenges readers to transcend the confines of time and place. It carries the message that when we feel lost in the trap of linearity, we can grow toward something a little more nourishing and caring–much like a field.
