1. From the microgothic to microbiome science

For a long time, we have associated microbial life mainly with infections, diseases, and unsanitary conditions. Since their discovery in the 17^th century by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), these tiny organisms have sparked human curiosity. In the 19^th century, pioneers such as Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) and Robert Koch (1843–1910) first demonstrated that microbes could harm human health. This discovery led to the widespread perception of microbes as invisible threats, contributing to a “microgothic” imagination that continues to shape public discourse to this day.Footnote ³ However, at the same time, not all views of microbes were negative. Alongside the fear of dangerous microorganisms, alternative perspectives emerged that emphasised the interconnectedness of microbes with larger living beings. Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (1795–1876), for example, stated as early as 1838 that microbial life, which he called “Infusoria,” were “perfect organisms” as complexly organised as their macrobic counterparts and placed them “quite evenly and equally in the ranks of the larger life forms.”Footnote ⁴ More ecological and holistic understandings, like those Ehrenberg stressed as early as the 1800s, highlight the essential roles of microbes in sustaining all planetary life.Footnote ⁵

More than twenty years ago, Nobel Laureate and early microbiome researcher Joshua Lederberg called for an end to the so-called ‘war on microbes’—a mindset that strict disinfection practices and the discovery of antibiotics in the 1940s had reinforced. Since then, interest in understanding microbes has grown significantly beyond their role in causing disease. Over the last two decades, microbiome research has revealed the intricate ways humans and microbes interact, leading to what some scholars term an “epistemic revolution” in the field and fundamentally challenging the public’s understanding of human–microbe relationships.Footnote ⁶

The extensive research on the microbiome over at least the last two decades has shown that the microbiome is closely linked to human physical and mental well- and ill-being, intricately connecting us with the inner and outer environments of human and nonhuman bodies, questioning human autonomy and ultimately, challenging traditional concepts of the human self and the—often precarious—modes of being human alongside other humans and nonhumans those entail.Footnote ⁷ Although a massive research output has been generated across a plethora of disciplines, including the natural and life sciences, medicine, and, to a degree, the humanities, an exact definition of what the microbiome actually is, contains, and does remains debated and continues to evolve as microbiome science advances.Footnote ⁸ Nevertheless, the fact remains that trillions of microorganisms, including bacteria, archaea, and fungi, inhabit and reside within our bodies, constituting our human microbiomes. Each one of us has a unique microbiome, which, however, is constantly changing and changing us, depending on factors such as our diets, lifestyle habits, physical and mental health, and the human and nonhuman beings we live with or encounter. Especially against the backdrop of what the World Health Organization (WHO) has called the “silent pandemic” of antibiotic resistance (AMR), current microbiome research highlights not only the many fundamental implications human’s nonhuman inhabitants have on their physical and mental well-being but also the numerous historical, epistemological, ethical, and societal implications of this knowledge in the making, as well as the complex circulatory processes it entails.Footnote ⁹

2. Circulating knowledge: science, literature, and the microbiome

Literary and artistic investigations have played a crucial role in imagining and publicising the microbiome and its numerous challenges. However, research on the microbiome from a literary perspective remains relatively scarce.Footnote ¹⁰ This is all the more surprising, since from very early on and continuing to this day, authors such as Mark Twain, Octavia E. Butler, and Joan Slonczewski have been inspired by microbial life forms and their relationship with the macro world beyond the paradigm of infection. A contemporary figure in this veritable literary microbiome is the Canadian poet and professor of poetry, Adam Dickinson. He centre-staged his own body’s porosity to perform the porousness of science and literature as well as of the individual, society, author, and audience. In 2018, Adam Dickinson published his poetry collection Anatomic, which, until today, is rather unrivalled regarding its structure and production process.Footnote ¹¹ While critic Heather Houser positions Dickinson’s poetry within the intellectual framework of “conceptual art, bioArt, and ecopoetics,” Paulina Ambroży sees it as an intriguing example of “posthuman lyric” taking a “biocentric perspective which repositions human epistemologies in relation to more-than-human matter,” and Max Karpinski highlights the “text’s experimental practice alongside a consideration of environmental affects.”Footnote ¹²

Supporting and further highlighting Dickinson’s significance for the fields of ecopoetics and environmental writing, more-than-human studies and Health Humanities, in this paper, I want to focus on the specific porousness and precarity of Dickinson’s work Anatomic, which, as I want to argue, renders it an exceptionally apt example of a Public Humanities’ engagement. Already, the author himself can be perceived as a protagonist of this line of work. As a literary scholar, he has been invested in exploring the intersections of science and poetry, diving into topics such as plastic materials, pataphysics, and metabolic processes of human and nonhuman bodies. As a poet, he has continually ventured into exploring alternative and highly innovative poetic modes that transcend and connect laboratory settings, written words, and lived experiences. Through his meticulous academic inter- and transdisciplinary endeavours, he not only bridges the domains of science and humanities but also, with his award-winning art, engages the broader public. Thus, in the best sense of Public Humanities’ objectives, Dickinson actively and critically engages with the manifold circulation processes of knowledge, making them, primarily through his art, almost viscerally palpable to audiences in and beyond Academia.Footnote ¹³

However, as Dickinson’s artwork impressively shows, circulation always also means permeability. Matter, thought, and knowledge can only circulate if borders—those of bodies, disciplines, and nations—are (made) porous. Stacey Alaimo has argued that “human corporeality” is “trans-corporeality” as “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” with “often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.”Footnote ¹⁴ Thus, porousness also entails precarity. Circulation may not always flow smoothly in both directions. Exchange may not necessarily be beneficial; mutual interest and understanding are not guaranteed. Often, power dynamics and measures of inclusion or exclusion are at play: What kind of knowledge, what matter—living and non-living—and whose bodies are welcomed to circulate? How do we engage with novel, sometimes unexpected, sometimes unwanted ideas, animate and inanimate material entities, and corporealities? How do we communicate the intricate, complex, and often ambiguous processes of knowledge-making that are at the heart of academic life—whether within the natural sciences or the humanities—to a highly diverse society? At the intersection of microbiome research, literary studies, and poetic composition, Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic tackles exactly these questions.

3. “You can love the questions, but you do not have to love the answers”: Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic

To compile his poetry collection, Dickinson monitored the microbes, hormones, and chemicals that surrounded and circulated through human and nonhuman bodies, ultimately leaving their marks on and in the author’s body itself. To do so, Dickinson collaborated with a variety of institutions across Canada and the United States, sending samples of his blood, sweat, urine, and faeces for detailed analysis to trace “the Anthropocene staring back in the form of persistent organic pollutants and microbial species,” demonstrating the intricate ways in which animate and inanimate matter in countless numbers and myriad forms is intertwined with humanity’s corporealities across time and space.Footnote ¹⁵ Dickinson created Anatomic as a highly hybrid text format. The poetry collection transgresses any traditional form of the genre, consisting of “a long poem in sections, called ‘Hormone,’ [that] runs throughout … with … chemical and microbial poems floating in amongst these streaming segments.”Footnote ¹⁶ In this poetico-scientific assemblage, each poetic text is dedicated to a specific hormone, microbe, or substance. The collection features various illustrations, charts, and visuals of and from the microbiological, (bio)chemical, and genetic analyses his body was subjected to for a period of two years and is framed by a brief introduction on how the author came to read and write himself, along with explanatory notes that help readers comprehend his literary version of a “metabolism already written.”Footnote ¹⁷ Dickinson states:

Here, at the very beginning of his genre-defying work of art, Dickinson seems to evoke Walt Whitman’s iconic dictum of “I contain multitudes” that “celebrates atomic interconnectedness of all beings” and, not only since the publication of Ed Yong’s hugely successful popular science book bearing the canonical words “Song to myself” of Whitman’s poetry collection Leaves of Grass (Reference Whitman1855) as title, has become a master narrative in the artistic and scientific discussion of the microbiome.Footnote ¹⁹ Especially the poems of Dickinson’s collection that primarily deal with the author’s microbial cohabitants chronicle the manifold—often precarious—circulation processes between humans and their inner and outer environments. His poems emphasise that many microbes perceived as potentially pathogenic are commensal and only become dangerous due to human (mis-)conduct. Thus, the precarious circulation in the centre of which the human body resides as a medium of passage is the primary concern of Dickinson’s poetry. It demonstrates, in a highly aestheticised, multigenre form that although modern microbiological analysis techniques make the human body transparent, it often remains an opaque mystery. The micro-narrative “Circulation,” subtitled “Staphylococcus,” stands paradigmatically for this troubling ambiguity:

Dickinson’s narrative instance stresses the idea of companionship with its nonhuman cohabitants, “as the collection explores the odd ontology of both being and containing otherness;” however, it cannot shake off a certain discomfort which echoes the Microgothic fascination and horror of the earliest days of microbial imagination which tightly connects to ecoGothic perceptions of the environment as a “space of crisis” in which the human and nonhuman coexist in a mutually precarious relationship.Footnote ²¹

Anxiety, defined in the poem “Circulation” as a “form of autoimmunity,” becomes a disease itself, repeatedly haunting the collection, as the feeling of his body’s porousness becomes like “living my life like a splinter being slowly driven into my own skin.”Footnote ²² The speaker’s microbiological bodily analyses reveal the pathological potential of his insides, the fragility of his body, and the ambiguity of his components down to the smallest detail, which, on the one hand, sustains and, on the other hand, could destroy it. Even though the narrative instance is by no means sick, death, coming from the outside and simultaneously leaking out, seems to dwell in every cell of its body. Thus, the experience of one’s own body cohabiting with multitudes of other life forms, mediated through masses of collected data, becomes an impressive example of the porous character of bodies, science, and literature—literally and literarily bleeding into each other in and through Anatomic. Footnote ²³ Coming to terms with being a homo microbis, especially in times when the “antibiotic era” seems at a dead end and new emerging diseases are constantly rising, fascinates and horrifies, and complicates the notion of living well with humans and nonhumans in myriad ways.Footnote ²⁴ By engaging with his microbiome at all costs, as Dickinson subjected his bodily fluids to cutting-edge microbiome science technologies, he ultimately demonstrates that lived and embodied experience, emerging knowledges, and artistic explorations brought together can disrupt traditional notions of the modes of being human and, by doing so, demand novel ways of “staying with the trouble” these disruptions expose.Footnote ²⁵

In this vein, Dickinson, in “Metabolic Poetics,” also points towards another reading of the multitudes that inhabit his body: “From the results of my blood tests, I can see the multinational companies that have written their flame retardants and PCBs into my flesh—I accumulate their products.”Footnote ²⁶ He stresses that the “outside writes the inside whether we like it or not” and that Capitalism is one of the leading authors of these writing processes.Footnote ²⁷

Thus, the “multinational companies” that we “wear” are not only billions of microbes metaphorically constituting many different “nations,” but actually, quite literally, the myriad multinational companies that constitute our global markets. It is the environmental waste, toxins, and social burdens that become co-authors of the writing of humans’ porous bodies and precarious lives. In fact, as Max Karpinski argues, Dickinson seems to urge that the continual “reshaping of the self” by being “constantly overwritten or ‘compose[d]’ by a range of environmental, chemical, and biological beings or markers” symbolises what it actually “means to be ‘human’ in the contemporary moment.”Footnote ²⁸

For Dickinson, “poetry, as writing most concerned with the limits of writing, is … well-positioned to respond to these extraordinary acts of inscription, making them legible in ways that might influence prevailing cultural and political conversations around pollution and public health” and that “situated at the intersection between science and art,” his work focuses on the “inscrutable biological and cultural writing intrinsic to the Anthropocene by responding to the metabolic processes of human and nonhuman bodies and their inextricable link to the global metabolism of energy and capital.”Footnote ²⁹

4. Containing multitudes

“Capitalism,” Dickinson remarks further with the words of McKenzie Wark, “is a communicable disease in the form of a disease of communication. It puts everything into communication with everything else.”Footnote ³⁰ In this sense, Capitalism becomes an infectious agent, a kind of pathogen itself, not only spreading across the planet but also sickening its deeply intertwined human and nonhuman Rowland Reference Rowland2023. Capitalist dynamics are deeply connected to questions of epistemic (in)justice—who is allowed to know what?—and health justice—who has access to care, who profits, who carries the burden, and who feels uncertainty and inequality most acutely?Footnote ³¹ These questions resonate strongly with issues of sexism, racism, and ableism in microbiome research as highlighted, for instance, by anthropologist Amber Benezra in her pivotal study GutAnthro—An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes. Footnote ³² At the same time, Capitalism plays a central role in the popularisation of the microbiome, fuelling both hopes and hypes while also driving processes of commercialisation.Footnote ³³ Against this backdrop, one of the pressing challenges is how to communicate the highly complex web of knowledge-making for which microbiome science stands paradigmatically. How can humanities researchers engage society in discourses around the opportunities and pitfalls of emerging knowledge? How can we navigate the hopes, hype, and anxieties connected to knowledge in the making, while also giving room to contested or submerged knowledge?

Adam Dickinson’s singular work demonstrates that, only by first acknowledging our bodies’ porousness, resulting in intricately and ambivalently connected human and more-than-human (co)existences, can new pathways of inter- and transdisciplinary imagining of alternative modes of being human be explored collaboratively within and beyond Academia. The way art and literature engage with the microbiome and its scientific exploration functions as a powerful example of the premises of Public Humanities, namely, to make “knowledge about human creativity and culture … more available to more people in more places and at different ages and stages of life.”Footnote ³⁴ Adam Dickinson’s poetry shows us how to truly transcend the borders of bodies, knowledge systems, and professional and social backgrounds to unleash the full potential of the Public Humanities in bringing together what are often perceived as separate spheres. However, in the face of the many crises of our time, engaging in Public Humanities through inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, hopefully, allows for a planetary future that “contains multitudes” as we do.Footnote ³⁵