Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN & Climate Justice Toronto. |
A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest.
In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it. Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical. This is a call to climate-justice action.
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Only the Sun, 2021 Music by Patrick Murray Text by Emily Schultz Used with permission. Performed by: Juliana Krajcovic Renee Fajardo Sharang Sharma Graham Robinson Patrick Murray ONLY THE SUN by Emily Schultz Who will notice when this leaf is gone? It is only a leaf, tiny, trembling, green; tomorrow’s auburn. No one will know. Only the bird will know. Who will notice when this love is gone? It is only a love, a ghost thing with no edges or shape. No one will know. Only I will know. Who will notice when this song is gone? It is only a song, one sound set beside another like a pair of shoes. No one will know. Only we will know. Who will notice when the sun is gone? It is only a sun, a hole of gold burned in an endless sky. No one will know. Only the dark will know. "Only the Sun" appeared in the anthology Watch Your Head: Writers & Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2021) Canadian choral conductor and composer Patrick Murray is Sessional Assistant Professor in Choral Music at Western University (London, Ontario) and director of the University of Toronto Scarborough Concert Choir. As a composer, Murray has been commissioned by ensembles including New York Polyphony, Carmel Bach Festival, and the Grand Philharmonic Choir, recorded by the DaCapo Chamber Choir, and published by Cypress Choral Music. Murray’s research focuses on inter-community collaboration in contemporary choral composition. His work is available at www.patrickmurraymusic.net. Emily Schultz published her newest novel, Little Threats, with GP Putnam’s Sons. It was named an Apple Books Best of November 2020 pick. Her novel, The Blondes, was released in the U.S. with Picador, in France with Editions Alto and Editions Asphalte, and in Canada with Doubleday. Named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR and Kirkus, it recently became a scripted podcast starring Madeline Zima. Her poems have appeared in Minola Review, rust + moth, Humber Literary Review, and Taddle Creek. Find out more at https://www.emilyschultz.com/
Mary of the Tower (she/they) is a settler-born member of the Filipinx diaspora, with roots to the Bicol Region and Nueva Ecija province of Luzon. She is currently living and working on the traditional homelands of the Tsuu T’ina (Sarcee) and Niitsitapi Peoples, also known as Calgary, Alberta/Treaty 7 territory. She is the owner and creator of Studio Kanlungan, a web-based community incubator for intergenerational healing through creativity. She also works as an intuitive, developing her gifts in mediumship, astrology, and Tarot card interpretation. She acknowledges her kinship ties to Treaty 6 territory (Saskatoon and Edmonton), Snuneymuxw and Quw’utsun/Tsawwassen/Hul’qumi'num territories, and Kwantlen/Katzie territory, where she has planted roots in the past and will continue to plant more, once this pandemic is over. Website studiokanlungan.co
THE BENDS Polished cameo a distilled mirror steam skimmed skin of water in the oval cue The ocean has no perceptible bottom The detritus of cargo ships strewn, submerged No one dives no strolls to retrieve Don’t rise too quickly back up to the sky Animal exhalations hold the wreckage of your heart poured into a white porcelain sink, angled down A paint spattered canvas Still, breathing – oxygenated There is not enough fresh air. near, a view, a window further, distant, the port. (a churning inland sea, painted surface of nothingness) what emerges four-legged from the shore a figure-ground illusion of an ancient-creature still living, distilled breath, “Dressed Landscape for Dry Ice Studies.” The perspective of a band practice The tarry instruments, tinny, far away of amplifiers affixed to stilts Someday the body will remember Its genealogy A generation of flailing limbs A Flirtation with Rapture The Skin of Victorian buildings floating in the after-birth of rain lakes Porous Fissures lattice network The painting hand thinking in a network of gestures of the linked orbital of satellite communications layers of the ascension the numbing epidermal of embodiment cold metal needle in the simulacra the metronome of a shaking hand the surgeon, hirsute At the bottom of the painting, hand-written, The cut ice letters Here where Holy ghost prophecy carries more weight than science FREEDOM Freedom senses all the tears of a thousand windowsills The rainbow of men and women shoulder to shoulder entering hotels and shelters Rowboat sailors with buttoned oars rough coughing from lungs of a sulfur sheen Of black coal in lieu of flowers holding the skirt of the lake. A thousand monarchs rose up, lifted both sides of the sky exposed exploited roe Inlaid into monoculture rows A cascade of waterfalls and memories accompanied the rain all night Rattling on about the cusp as it danced though never unattended The flood waters rang out May the lake take you under to dream May the sky rise to meet you when you awaken. Robert Frede Kenter is a writer and visual artist, who lives with ME/FM, is widely published and exhibited and is a 2020 Pushcart nominee. Work recently in Black Bough, Burning House Press, Cypress, Talking about Strawberries, Floodlight Ed., Anthropocene, Cough. Robert is publisher of Toronto-based Ice Floe Press www.icefloepress.net & author of a recent hybrid collection, Audacity of Form (Ice Floe Press). A chapbook of VISPO, "EDEN", is forthcoming later in 2021. Robert was a feature reader in 2020 at Cheltenham Poetry Festival. Twitter: @frede_kenter
A FEW BEARS I know of a few bears bears who seem thinner than normal they’ll slap your hands the bears are getting hungry Bears who seem thinner than normal these are facts: the bears are getting hungry I'm here to show you reality These are facts: The bears have been starving I'm here to show you reality along the shorelines where grizzlies have been The bears have been starving I'm not here to point fingers along the shorelines where grizzlies have been winners and losers in climate change I’m not here to point fingers without a necropsy winners and losers in climate change if you prefer looking at life from the end Without a necropsy we’re able to observe an emaciated mother if you prefer looking at life from the end in search of berries We’re able to observe an emaciated mother they’ll slap your hands in search of berries I know of a few bears. * (Assembled from recent news articles.) UNMOORED (after Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “Ship of Fools”) It always comes down to what has been lost – a cat, a mind, a god, a compass. Sometimes a silver sack of virtue spins away. Who has not shinnied up the spar pole to carve a fat drumstick from a roast goose? Or lusted for a pancake on a string? Or raised a flask to brain a pickled sinner in a ship as oval as a duck egg or an office for a head of state? We long for guidance from the owl above, our avatar of insight or scandal (depending on the century). We pluck the cherries, stir the winey sea, let the jester with an ass’s ears keep watch as we buck and sway into a melting glacier, its teal horizon a last reminder of the butterflies and jays. Kim Goldberg is the author of eight books of poetry and nonfiction. Her latest book is Devolution (Caitlin Press, 2020), surreal poems and fables of ecopocalypse. It was described as a "ferocious collection" in the Vancouver Sun. Kim's poetry has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in North America and abroad including The Capilano Review, Literary Review of Canada, Dark Mountain, subTerrain and Riddle Fence. She chaired the Women's Eco-Poetry panel at the inaugural Cascadia Poetry Festival in Seattle. Kim holds a degree in biology and is an avid birdwatcher in Nanaimo BC. Twitter: @KimPigSquash. https://pigsquash.wordpress.com/
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AboutWatch Your Head is an online journal of creative works devoted to the climate crisis and climate justice.
New work is published monthly! Masthead Mission Submissions Contact Gallery Film & Video Nonfiction Fiction Contributors Donations Resources Check out our latest project: a print anthology published by Coach House Books!
Watch Your Head: Writers & Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis
Coach House Books October 2020 Archives
February 2022
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