The world’s forests were formed to a large extent through the forest cultivation and relational life-worlds of Indigenous communities over generations. Rastrojo is integral to the forest cultivation of those communities. It follows the forests’ diverse relations, constituting a relational continuity of death nourishing life in which communities’ intergenerational relations intertwine with those of the forest and its other-than-human life-worlds. The destruction of forests disrupts those life-generating connectivities, taking claims on forest and Indigenous futures. The cultivation of rastrojo involves the reparation of those relations that in turn generate the conditions for resurgence while confronting the ongoing colonization and destruction of those interconnected life-worlds. Resurgence is grounded in those relations, connecting the past to future generations, and in resistance, which depends on the reparation of communities’ relations with the other-than-human life-worlds of forests. This is the forest resurgence of rastrojo.

Rastrojo is a poetry revista dedicated to the defense of forests and the cultivation of resurgent futures. It is a response to the ongoing colonization and destruction of forests and their diverse life-worlds, including those of the communities who defend them. These communities describe the forest in terms of its relationality. Forests form living entanglements of diverse life-worlds decomposing each other and the forest itself through relations of death folding into life. For these communities, their defense of the forest is grounded in this notion of relationality. Rastrojo explores what we can learn from forests and the communities who defend them, and how this notion of relationality can orient our responses to their destruction towards the possibilities of resurgent forest futures.

Rastrojo cultivates poetic resistance and response to forest destruction grounded in relationality. It is committed to the generation of a re(in)surgent poetics for the defense of forests. A re(in)surgent poetics intervenes in forest destruction through the cultivation of a reparative relationality together with forests and their diverse life-worlds, contributing to the conditions for forest resurgence. Through this reparative and resurgent orientation, a re(in)surgent poetics conjures the force of the life of the forest to resist ongoing colonization and destruction and regrow forest futures.