The presentations (15 minutes each) build on studies such as Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water (2007), Kamau Brathwaite’s ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey (1999), and Elizabeth DeLoughry’s “Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity” (2010), bringing them into conversation with Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies (2016), Thomas Nail’s Theory of the Earth (2021), and Kathryn Yusoff’s Geological Life (2024) to show that oceanic and geological lenses need not be separated by academic taxonomies but can instead be read together as continuous critical approaches.

Manuela Luengas will begin by exploring how rivers and mix-water deltas require different epistemological frameworks than those found in the ocean humanities, particularly to account for their vectorial movement, sedimentation process, and connectivity between in-land territories. The human and more-than-human relationships they host are also different, affected as they are by droughts, water levels, and amphibian species. Through the poetry of Colombian Tomás Gonzalez in Manglares (2018), situated in the Caribbean mangrove, and the installation work of artist Alicia Barney Caldas (Río Cauca 1981–1982, and Yumbo 2008), she analyzes their artistic attunement to multi-species river assemblages (fish, floating roots, fishermen, elder’s memories, muddy shores). Their poetic and visual interventions reveal the extent to which these ecotones bear the marks of environmental and political violence. Read together, these works’ engagements with river ecologies contribute to a theorization of what Luengas calls “fluvial sedimentary poetics.”

Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz will follow with an analysis of A Bell Made of Stones (2013) by Lehua M. Taitano, a Chamorro poet from Guam. Taitano develops an oceanic poetics that confers historical and geological depth onto the page, positing Chamorro culture and lore as fossilized into the island’s landscapes and seascapes while taking stock of the ecological consequences of colonialism. The book opens with a two-line poem surrounded by an oversized page—“inside me an island / shaped hole”—conveying a sense of diasporic nostalgia where the enjambed compound adjective extends its interplay between presence and absence to the rest of the page. The poem thus displays Taitano’s investment in spatial experimentation: a visual recodification of the page’s whiteness to challenge the idea of empty space in relation to the colonial notion of terra nullius and the historical occupations of Guam by the Spanish, Japanese, and US. Taitano’s poetry fosters this relation to place as an appraisal of the decolonial possibilities that an oceanic poetics affords against Guam’s current political situation.

Next, Santiago Acosta turns to Latin American poetry to examine “living fossils”—organisms that have changed little over millions of years. Focusing on El Celacanto (1980), by Venezuelan Elena Vera, and Límulo (2016), by Mexican Ángel Vargas, which take as their objects the coelacanth and the horseshoe crab, respectively, he asks how poetry imagines life as continuous with geological processes. Vera situates the coelacanth as a witness of timescales that “shatter time / against the rocks.” Vargas presents the horseshoe crab—“more spider than fish, more animal than man”—as resisting taxonomy while articulating a claim to time outside Western and anthropocentric cosmologies. Guided by Deleuze’s “becoming-animal,” Acosta explores the concept of becoming-mineral: a zone of proximity between living beings and lithic orders. The point is not that rocks or geological matter are alive, but that life itself is already geological. Ultimately, these poems displace the dominant associations of fossilization with fossil fuels or fossil capitalism, offering instead a space for rethinking the terms of earthly existence.

We have invited Nicolás Campisi as respondent given his work on Anthropocene and planetary aesthetics, as well as his research on the geological turn in Latin American fiction. He will situate the panel within broader debates on eco-aesthetics and non-anthropocentric thought. Campisi will respond for up to 10 minutes, posing questions that advance the discussion and allow for at least 20 minutes of audience exchange.

The panel includes scholars across different institutional contexts, career stages, and social positions, including gender and geographic location.