"Jennifer Scappettone's new book is poetry barely containable in book form. The text is a relentlessly inventive and exhausting survey of a landfill visible from space and located across the street from the poet’s childhood home. Lyricism spurred from personal agony alternates with legal jargon from EPA lawsuits and is threaded through with anaphora reminiscent of Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl".... The size and chemical complexity of this poetry, mirroring its subject’s, suggests a post-human audience, perhaps the landfill itself, or some future population able to find meaning in what our present society discards." —James Yeary, Boston Review

“Scappettone’s book is an over-the-top literary mash-up…. These strips of paper are not just metaphors for the unearthing of metals and minerals long buried under geological strata. They also correspond to the soundbytes, the snippets of information and disinformation, that pass by, over, and through our bodies every day of our digital lives…..Featuring a cast of characters from Greek, Roman, and Italian myth (Virgil, Orfeu, Sirens, and Io), Lewis Carroll (Alice), and a chorus of chemical compounds, industrial tools and machines and corporate CEOs, The Republic reads like a lunatic version of American history—that is, exactly like the consequences of American history: “Is it possible to mobilize the disgust provoked by encounter with what has been cast off, to transform a wasteland from an abject repository of undifferentiated filth into an archive?” ….In bringing together the gendered notion of household and farm management with technology—that “wire husbandry”—Scappettone reminds us that the queered pronoun they perfectly captures the non-binary post-humanist world. As the old binarisms of Enlightenment humanism (man/woman, nature/culture, West/East, etc.) flare up like dying embers, and populism, fundamentalism, and fascism retake the world stage, ecopoetics, the nexus of etymology and ecology, offers us glimpses into our singular dark future.” —Tyrone Williams, “Etymology, Ecology, and Ecopoetics,” Georgia Review

“These poetics resist making toxified subjects legible in the terms of discrete bodies and linear structures of cause and effect, while also exposing the simultaneous slipperiness and stickiness of toxicity operating in logics that reproduce the uneven and often violent modes of organization of capitalism’s ecologies. However, in the process Scappettone rejects the possibility of an impartial or unentangled critical perspective, making complicity a necessary condition of toxic embodiment. In the messy web of obscured evidence and narrowed legibility in state and corporate modalities of making sense, The Republic of Exit 43 holds out a commitment to strained memory with others—toxified bodies and collectives—as a mode of assembly and reassembly, in/organically, across toxic infrastructures’ seepages, slippages, and containments.” Kate Lewis Hood, “In the ‘Fissures of Infrastructure’: Poetry and Toxicity in ‘Garbage Arcadia,’” Environmental Humanities

“Sometimes one is defeated by a text, and that defeat is where the sublime enters in, when one might perceive the allure of the textual object, and maybe its terror. I fall asleep with Jennifer Scappettone’s The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump, and at the moment of fatigue settling into unconsciousness, I am reminded what the title itself implies: that the text…is elsewhere, that this book of outtakes and scores itself is a kind of detritus twice removed. It is the disenchanted remainder of ephemeral, embodied performances staged in the toxic kingdom of our collective remainders—the landfills, oilspills and other post-arcadian wastelands of Scappettone’s project… [T]he archeological details of the dump and the poems created from the language of the dump are exacting, incontrovertible, experienced as if the poet has explored the very limits of where human perception must give way in the face of the immensity of ecological disaster, the not-there of our sensuous predicament.” —Joe Milutis, “3 Unbooks: DuPlessis, Scutenaire, Scappettone,” 3:AM

"Jennifer Scappettone animates the materiality of her subject: literary scholarship is still catching up to syntax of slow violence still buried under landfills. Yet The Republic of Exit 43 foregrounds the persistent encounters with archives of abjection in which we, by our humanity, are all implicated. At stake is the fate of ecocritical discourse in light of the proposal H.R. 861, a bill recently introduced to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency. The future erasure of environmental security intersects with the current alienation of the landfill-cum-recreation park. Histories are still caught in the undertow of leaking garbage." —Orchid Tierney, "Menacing Archives,” Jacket2

"I admire Jennifer Scappettone’s The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump; her title barely begins to cover the performances, essays, collages, analyses, and rigorous rage within." —Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Poetry

“Jennifer Scappettone's work of geopoetic writing reminds us that we are in a tangle between word and matter, but we look away from that knot taking refuge in the wireless imagination—when, after all, that imaginary exists within the materiality of servers that are mostly private. Her writing forces us to rethink the ethical position of writing and poetry under this economic and environmental system; it invites us to collect words from the earth in order to configure new spaces of justice.” “El trabajo de escritura geopoética de Jennifer Scappettone nos hace recordar que estamos en un enredo entre la palabra y la materia, pero desviamos la mirada de ese nudo refugiándonos en el imaginario inalámbrico; cuando a fin de cuentas ese imaginario existe dentro de la materialidad de los servidores mayoritariamente privados. Su escritura nos obliga a repensar la posición ética de la escritura y de la poesía bajo este sistema económico y ambiental, nos invita a recolectar las palabras sacándolas de la tierra para poder configurar nuevos espacios de justicia..” —Mauricio Patrón Rivera, “Collecting Words from the Earth: The Geopoetics of Jennifer Scappettone”/“Recogiendo palabras de la tierra: La geopoética de Jennifer Scappettone,” Grafógraxs

"[Scappettone's] journey in waste becomes an ecocritical exercise in memory that—like Robert Smithson’s mixed-media account of polluted areas in Utah—casts light on obscured scenes of trauma and geographical displacement deeply embedded in the cartographies of modernist America....  Given that investigative journalism is at risk today, Scappettone’s ecopoetry steps in to serve the documentary purpose of detecting sensitive regions depleted by the dark economy of the waste business, thus deeply affecting the cultural memory and the distinctive anthropological dimension of those violated territories.... In disclosing the poisonous debris of exhausted consumption, her combination of poetry and pictures is a radical act of environmental responsibility." —“Alice in Wasteland: Exit 43 by Jennifer Scappettone, in the Transnational Environmental Crisis,” Daniela Daniele, University of Udine

"The Republic of Exit 43 shows how the world colonized by Alice has been “cultivated”, how the extra-human has been appropriated and introduced into the economic circuit, how its growth can be obtained through added chemical substances, fertilizers that accelerate its production, the consequences of visibility, knowledge etc.... Jennifer Scappettone might provide the best answer for...those questions that demonstrate how literature can become a performative act. Although an art of memory, of memoirism or, quite the opposite, of possible worlds, utopias, it can sometimes position itself on the line that separates them, thus becoming a frontier art through which the archived past that was passed on in the form of ascertaining descriptive discourse  becomes action, present action played out for the receiver not through the technique of representation but via direct participation.... Performative literature therefore remains a laboratory where history is replayed, reassembled in order to make use of its waste." —Iulia Militaru, "Literature As Performative Writing," published in Romanian and in English for ARTA, December 2017

“Perhaps collage/montage, used by both Loy and Scappettone, is one of the most polyphonous, nuanced and ethical ways of writing (about) history, including that of the wasteland.” —Joanna Mąkowska, “On refuse and ‘refusees’: Jennifer Scappettone’s Republic of Exit 43 and Mina Loy’s Bowery poems,” Ekopoetyka

“It investigates, documents, collages, filters, excavates, repudiates, remediates, and sings to a decommissioned copper mill and the Syosset Landfill, and through a chorus of voices, guided by Lewis Carroll’s Alice. The landscape is adjacent to where Jen grew up, just off the Long Island Expressway. The book’s part docupoetics, part postmodern masque, part activist punk pastoral. Jen’s exhumation of the landfill is a kind of underworlding; she sings to it, baffles it, anodynes it—a childhood adjacency that’s also a Superfund site…. So a deeply moving conflation, a site-specific investigation of one’s childhood nemesis, and also a metaphor for America’s toxic ecology that turns out to be anything but a metaphor. It’s really stunning, as much a visual collage––Scappettone is equally a visual artist––as a book of poems….You experience the dump as a collaged stratigraphy, the primary colors or toxins, or in blurred strips that resemble passing the dump at speed. Exit 43 off the LIE, a “third landscape,” to use the term of Gilles Clément, that you try not to see. And yet the horror show makes a beautiful book. So the very thing is a physical manifestation of the “digging,” a counterweight if you will. And a kind of ecopoetical intervention that odes and elegizes the lost––the Pop-Up Opera––while also using the skills of archival research to unearth poisons, reworld place.” —Matthew Cooperman, “A singular book of poems from the last ten years,” Etecetera Poetry, October 2022