Entangled Worlds: Affect Theory and New Materialist Relationality in Selected Poems of Mahmoud Darwish and Louise Glück

This paper investigates how poetry reshapes affective, ethical, and political relations among humans, land, and the nonhuman, focusing on selected poems by Mahmoud Darwish and Louise Glück. Drawing on Affect Theory and New Materialism, the study challenges human-centered approaches that treat nature as passive or symbolic, arguing instead that poetic language generates sensations, emotions, and relational experiences before conscious interpretation. Ethics is approached as a practice rooted in attentiveness, empathy, and responsibility toward both human and nonhuman others. Through close reading, the study highlights how poetry enacts relational entanglements, showing land, plants, and elemental forces as active participants in affective and ethical dynamics. Darwish’s work presents attachment to land as deeply entangled with displacement, political violence, memory, survival, and the struggle for belonging, while Glück emphasizes responsibility, awareness, and responsiveness without mastery. Overall, the study demonstrates that poetry can cultivate renewed relations with the nonhuman, offering alternatives to anthropocentric thinking, exclusion, and violence.