Hull gives us space to think about the affective ties between disability (visible and invisible) and ravaged environments. 1 As we pass Newark I think of the rest of Hull’s poem, “Hospice,” which recounts the life and illness of the speaker’s sister in their home state, New Jersey: “the body, twisting / in a tissue of smoke and dust over Jersey’s / infernal glory of cocktail lounges and chemical plants, / the lonely islands of gas stations lining the turnpike.” 2 I remember Hull here not only because I am passing Newark-her city of birth and the partial subject of her book Star Ledger-but also because Hull’s merging of New Jersey’s environment with her sister’s ill body is an important merging point for me as an environmental humanities scholar and a disabled woman. As we crawl into New Jersey, I think of how Newark poet Lynda Hull described the transit corridor: “surf of trees / by the railway’s sharp cinders.” It’s more of a patchwork, now, of plastic bottles, pasture grass, and at least one superfund site along Berry’s Creek. The line of train cars moves through the Hudson tunnel like a slug and I settle into my window seat. It is Saturday in New York and the local trains are slow moving and plump with people.
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