Mantic Compost is a book of poems that explores, through Surrealist modes of composition, the psychological impacts of the Anthropocene. The book takes its title from American Surrealist Eugene Jolas, who proposed that Surrealism should strive to express the dynamis of the objective world, using the transmutative and mediumistic possibilities of language. Drawing on Surrealist imagery, as well as techniques such as automatic writing, the book explores the ways in which language, used as a mediumistic and impressionable organ, can demonstrate the reciprocal impressions of the world upon our psyche and our psyches impression upon the world. The reality of the AnthropoceneNature reconceived as that which is capable of being altered by and, in turn, altering human lifedemands a new use of language for the expression of that reality. Mantic Compost is an attempt at that languagean attempt to revitalize eco-poetics in light of the Anthropocene. Mantic Compost is preceded by the critical introduction Mantic Compost Poetics: An Ontological Defense of Surrealism in the Service of Eco-poetics. This introduction attempts to justify the necessity of Surrealisms permeation of eco-poetics. Arguing that the most vital task of the eco-poet today is to encapsulate the experience of the Anthropocene, it demonstrates that this can only be achieved through the deployment of an ecologically-oriented ontology and ultimately asserts that Surrealism is the best poetic mode through which this ontology might be artistically communicated.
