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.
|
Buy WATCH YOUR HEAD from these booksellers
Another Story Bookshop ~ Coach House Books ~ Glass Bookshop ~ knife | fork | book ~ Librairie Drawn & Quarterly ~ Massy Books ~ Munro's Books If you are an independent bookseller and are carrying this book, let us know! This anthology is not to be missed. The pandemic may have defined our year, but the climate crisis defines our time in geological history. See how this roster of talented writers and artists advance the conversation, put the crisis in context and call for climate justice. |
PLASTIC I ought to start with someone else's gain, step outside myself, put on the red and distant visor, be the other queen. Remember what is still to come. Forget. An ocean, say, with pebbles full of eyes – or what were once the outer skins of sight – how beautiful they are, intact and white against the deadened grey, intense cerise. Or maybe sand instead; the other side of memory. A hundred million minds meaningless now. A sparrow hops across snow. A dog barks. DIRECTION The wishbone though. Intact and delicate like a canoe slicing through the nothingness that should have been a heartbeat. Strength so often gets overlooked in the pink hour of dried blood. And so we miss the open mouth of determination, the way a foot is lifted not towards or away from but against. Ayesha Chatterjee is the author of two poetry collections, The Clarity of Distance, and Bottles and Bones. Her work has appeared in journals across the world and been translated into French and Slovene. Chatterjee is past president of the League of Canadian Poets and chair of the League’s Feminist Caucus. She is poetry advisor for Exile magazine.
SEVEN IMAGES FROM THE SERIES 'ENDANGERED.' VISION: Butternutbutternut creates art inspired by conscious living, a bright and quirky take on a utopia where animals and humans coexist in harmony. For this series, Endangered, I wanted to hero endangered species to bring awareness to the alarming reduction in population. When we think of tigers, rhinos, orangutans, the general understanding is that they exist, freely, in the wild, but the truth is that we are close to extinction, and they only exist in conservation areas. This series in meant to humanize these animals, hence they are shown on human bodies, and start the dialogue on what we can do to help them, whether through mindful tourism, conscious buying of goods and services or donations. Over continued years of illegal trade, poaching, deforestation, and climate change, we are responsible for this tragedy, and now we need mass awareness to help save these species. Butternutbutternut was started in 2018 by Shinjini Sur, a self-taught artist. Shin's vision is to create art inspired by conscious living - bright, fun, and quirky pieces critiquing social norms. Her iconic work shows animals on human bodies to personify and humanize them, ultimately bringing to life a utopian world where humans and animals coexist in harmony. She is currently experimenting with new materials and home decor - check out butternutbutternut.com for more of her work. *20% of all proceeds from shopping this collection goes to the World Wildlife Fund in support of endangered, critically endangered, and vulnerable animals.*
BUSHFIRE There is one road in and out – mountain to sea and back again. We take it while we still can, trail the steady line of traffic climbing towards a choked sky. Streams only travel in one direction or dry up in heatwaves such as this. The temperatures are still rising. Last night, as the children slept, we watched light streak across the sky illuminating our shack on the hill – the back steps built close to jagged shrubs and grass. This morning we packed everything and left, shoved pink flip-flops and beach-balls into the boot, headed north. We saw flames above the trees. By nightfall that road was blistered, nothing but a scorched leaf-littered underpass, a net for fiery embers and sparks. Burning strips of eucalypt bark leapt from one side of the black lake to the other. We watch the news, recognise place names, on digital maps, not meant for tourists. We walked those beaches where huge groups gather, waiting for the ferocious fires to burn themselves out, return again to ash-dusted patches of land. BARGAINING When life comes down to a headspace of air beneath a jetty – the atmosphere toxic – and above swirling tornadoes of fire, the house burning down to the ground, trees glowing scarlet in the haze, hissing, spitting out sparks, and a fireball sun beaming yellow, eucalypts exploding under a Mercurian orange-streaked sky – you cling to wood, cling to your grandchildren, let the youngest lock fingers around your neck, her blonde curls bobbing on the cold surface, her eyes wide, lips a thin, pale line – wonder where their mother is, if she’s praying, check for five heads above water. Make your case. Stephanie Conn is a poet and current PhD Researcher from Northern Ireland. Her first collection The Woman on the Other Side (Doire Press, 2016) was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award for Best First Collection. Her pamphlet Copeland’s Daughter (Smith/Doorstep, 2016) won the Poetry Business Poetry Competition. Her most recent collection Island was published by Doire Press in 2018. Stephanie is a multi-award winning poet, including the inaugural Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. She is the recipient of a range of Arts Council awards and has read her work locally, nationally and internationally. Find out more at https://stephanieconn.org/. Follow @StephanieConn2
8 POEMS: SENRYU, HAIKU, KYOKA, TANKA I How did she do it Red Riding Hood, luring wolves into extinction? Was it expert marketing or her flawless marksmanship? II Is this blazing earth just angry - or signing our Eviction-notice? III The heavens last night Poured out their discontent heart Flooding our basements IV Showers in forecast After us comes the deluge Our prospectless toast Too drunk to dream a future Our off-key drinking song V While the ice cap thaws I'll regret my lusting for Gentler winter winds VI Lonely ice flake floats on lukewarm Arctic waters - my eyes are melting The edges of existence now bend toward depression VII Mid-summer sultry tiny bug bites won't disprove our insect collapse I offer my scratchy arms In pursuit of atonement VIII The city's humming I listen for sounds of hope through morning traffic Hege Jakobsen Lepri is a Norwegian-Canadian translator and writer. She returned to writing in 2011 and had her first story published in English in J Journal in 2013. She has since been published widely in Canada and the US. Her most recent work is featured or forthcoming in The New Quarterly, Carve Literary Magazine, Hobart, Agnes and True, Journal of Compressed Arts, Gone Lawn, Belletrist, Crack the Spine, Prism International and elsewhere. You find her on her on twitter @hegelincanada, Instagram: @hege.a.j.lepri and on her website: www.hegeajlepri.ca FLOTSAM bottles plastic bags underwear gum wrappers receipts caps toothbrushes lighters cups end up in the sea’s vast net of light waves heaving the weight of our waste back and forth back and forth the ocean tumbling shards of beer bottles into oblong pebbles of sea glass weaving bloated plastic bags into nooses for seagulls breaking bottle caps into bait for lantern fish Our sparkling garbage dump brims with cockles and crap. our hands throw trash overboard the giver of life receives. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT "Flotsam" was originally published in Firesmoke, Mawenzi House, 2014 Sheniz Janmohamed (MFA) is a firm believer in fostering community through collaboration, compassion and creativity. In her own practice, she strives to embody words through performance, land art and writing in the ghazal form. A poet, artist educator and land artist.
Sheniz has performed her work in venues across the world, including the Jaipur Literature Festival, Alliance Française de Nairobi and the Aga Khan Museum. Her land art has been featured at the Aga Khan Park, the Indian Summer Festival and the Art Gallery of Mississauga. Sheniz is also the author of two collections of poetry: Bleeding Light (Mawenzi House, 2010) and Firesmoke (Mawenzi House, 2014). Sheniz visits dozens of schools and organisations each year to teach, perform, and inspire creativity in her students. In 2015, She was awarded the Lois Birkenshaw-Fleming Creative Teaching Scholarship, and holds a Artist Educator Mentor certificate from the Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto). Sheniz is also the founder of Questions for Ancestors, a blog that encourages BIPOC writers and artists across Turtle Island to ask questions of their ancestors as provide advice for their descendants. Sheniz is currently working on her third collection of ghazals. www.shenizjanmohamed.com DISCOURSE OF THE LAST BLADE OF SENSITIVE SHY GRASS Oceans recede and Henry Darger was tracing all along. Boys are carrying banners and I am not home. If my bedroom light is burning you’re hallucinating electricity and the on-switch. Your dryer is done, go on. That’s not a claxon. Wind blows that way—alright, wind blows other way—okay BOYS
We are the four who discover Lascaux we bring lichens and mold to the dun horse and stag we turn bison to talc, choke the longest living duck. When our mothers see the clay we part our arms, like curtains at the opera when they insist, we grow antlers cut them off and let them have it: the head of a stag, branched as lightning, is the new forest, centerpiece of her dining room supper to her feast. Marta Balcewicz's poems and stories appear in Tin House Online, AGNI Online, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere. She is the fiction editor for Minola Review and lives in Toronto. Find her at www.martabalcewicz.com.
HOPE OF THE HUMMINGBIRD For the past decade, severe wind storms have battered the little community I live in on the Pacific Coast. Leg-thick tree limbs have busted roofs, littered lawns, flattened bushes, and felled old trees in our adjoining forest. This spectre is climate change. Elsewhere, the world is burning. What can one person do? Our solution is simple. During fall, we hang up a hummingbird feeder, seed feeders for larger birds, and a suet feeder for winter. We nourish the most vulnerable creatures of the forest, without discouraging their natural ability to forage. The small, bright glow of hope of our hummingbird friends inspired this poetic honouring: Shimmering red tweed on green our tiny guest wings beat time its needle dips deep into the slit of our offered feeder’s yellow plastic petals your forest retreat thinned climate-peril windstorm our serving a small buffer against a grievous global surge of natural tragedies one shock-absorber stands firm ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS "A Vortex" previously published in print in Otoliths, issue fifty, part two, southern winter, 2018 and online at the-otolith.blogspot.com "Hope of the Hummingbird" first published by Elephant Journal, September 25, 2019 Elaine Woo has long engaged in the discourse on environmental justice through her poetry and visual art. She would like to see many more join in and take action in ways, big or small, as able. She is the author of the collections Put Your Hand in Mine, 2019 and Cycling with the Dragon, 2014.
To Aliens (all) we fucked up the planet that is not by choice well not by my choice and not by a lot of people I know it was sort of an accumulative fucking up so you probably shouldn’t come back here or visit for the first time right now you should probably just wait until this part of humanity is gone because while we have fucked it up currently i don’t have much hope that we’ll be around that much longer to continue fucking it up and after that you can come visit again the things that come after us will probably be hotter anyways To plant life (all), you show what you heal in your very makeup the cellular structure of what you are giving us a map to all that means to be alive seen in valerian root shaped like a nervous system used to calm our nerves and send us to sleep seen in strawberries cut in half the picture of a human heart used to heal our hearts seen in St. John’s wort bright yellow flowers calling forth joy used to heal depression you show us and sadly, only some of us see Francine Cunningham is an award-winning Indigenous writer, artist and educator originally from Calgary, AB but who currently resides in Vancouver, BC. She is a graduate of the UBC Creative Writing MFA program, and a recent winner of The Indigenous Voices Award in the 2019 Unpublished Prose Category and of The Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. Her fiction has appeared in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s Prose shortlist, Joyland Magazine, The Puritan Magazine, and more. Her debut book of poetry is titled ON/Me (Caitlin Press). You can find out more about her at www.francinecunningham.ca.
BOTTLED Light slow as honey in its antique shell, rubber stopper lazy at the end, snarled curl of the lip ring silver round glass—yes glass, but thick, the kind that keeps you guessing, stretching feeble for the other side. The way a frenzied starling builds her nest in May, one flimsy clutch of twigs at a time. The light unclaimed through my delay, seeping in as if from nowhere, stilted, clotted as in the white-shelled tank I saw one inverted summer day in Melbourne, where a squid lay slumped in a corner like a pile of unwashed laundry, her eye a steady accusation before the rounded window that glimpsed our own grey-glimmer world. TRY TO HATCH FISH AND STONES* know what to do with your chalky misfortunes. Revive dreams like mammoths, an old relationship. Await the birth of a patience, eternal, yet to be mastered in any hemisphere. Know what to do with disappointment. If lucky, lucky. In the long quest for an everyday, don’t forget to revise your expectations. Protect the charge that is your wanting. If queer, well. Know what to do with heartache. Hitch your wagon to a laboratory. Keep that hope within your belly, under the perfect tuxedo flap of skin, snug beneath your lungs. *“Berlin gay penguins adopt abandoned egg.” BBC News from Elsewhere, 12 August, 2019. Reporting by Martin Morgan. Annick MacAskill is a queer and feminist poet and translator based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq. Her debut collection, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award. Her second collection, a book of love poetry, will be published by Gaspereau Press in the spring of 2020.
THROUGH ALL KINDS OF WEATHER Channel 45 They’re down to the final four on So You Think You Can Text? The judges have locked in their scores and Richard is going home. To costal Regina. Channel 46 The party’s off to a slow start on Orgy Pad. Contestants can’t concentrate. Not with the roof missing. There’s mood-killing daylight in the Velvet Room. And all that blurred-out flesh moves with virtually no enthusiasm. Channel 47 Flash floods in Fredericton. Wildfires in Winnipeg. Tornados in Toronto, the CN Tower plucked, planted needle-down, piercing a pipeline. It’s Russ and his State of Emergency roundup. “Is this the end? This reporter thinks so,” he says to empty living rooms across the country. “Is anyone out there? Maybe you’re flipping through the channels, looking for something mindless to take the edge off.” Russ hits a button. It brings up a banner graphic with his cell phone number. “Russ is going full telethon. All Russ all the time. Call me. I don’t want to die alone.” Channel 48 Undercover Brute. In which Rico discovers the smog-related respiratory illnesses plaguing his deadbeat clients. He’s moved to tears. He gives them another week to pay up before he breaks their legs. Channel 49 Knife Swap. A cleaver for Rita. A carver for Ted. Because it’s getting crazy out there, people. Channel 47 Russ has the whiskey out. And his clothes off. He’s draped over the anchor’s desk checking his phone for missed calls. “Anyone? Anyone?” The banner graphic with Russ’s phone number is still on screen. “Call me. You can’t live for tomorrow. Tomorrow is happening and it’s an arid wasteland. Fucking disease and tumbleweeds. And I want to live. I want to find you and make post-apocalyptic love. So pick up the phone and—” Adam Giles’ short fiction has appeared in Sonora Review, The Feathertale Review, The Humber Literary Review, Riddle Fence, The Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His story “Corduroy” won the University of Toronto Magazine Short Story Contest in 2013, and other stories have been longlisted and named runner-up in PRISM International’s Fiction Contest, the House of Anansi Broken Social Scene Story Contest, and the Penguin Random House of Canada Student Award for Fiction. His writing has also been nominated for the National Magazine Awards and the Best of the Net Anthology. He lives in Mississauga, Ontario, with his wife and two children. Find him on the web at www.adamgiles.ca.
WHAT TIME LEFT Geoffrey Nilson is a writer, editor, visual artist, and the founder of poetry micropress pagefiftyone. His work has appeared recently in PRISM, CV2, Coast Mountain Culture, and is forthcoming as part of Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds from Caitlin Press in winter 2020. He lives with his daughter in New Westminster on the unceded territory of the Qayqayt First Nation.
CLIMATE ANXIETY our grocery store is out of tofu in Calgary o town that runs on beef & crude oil understocked soy blocks a sign of hope when we’re usually just coughing our way out of smoke this time of year instead the amazon’s burning for profit and everyone’s so scared of death they forget some of us will survive The End— mass extinction doesn’t happen in a day! yap the dinosaur jaws compressing below us and if climate change is getting you down you can send a gif of Jeff Goldblum through a server system that will burn as much fuel as the airline industry by 2020 it’s all pretty bleak but you know, uh, life, uh, finds a way Trynne Delaney is a Black/EuroSettler queer living as an uninvited guest on Treaty 7 territory. She's currently completing her MA in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. You can catch her bundled up like a 7 layer burrito watching the river and waiting for another chinook.
ALIENATION (THE TRANSFERRING OF TITLE OR OF INTEREST) Accounts were ignition sources from within their own perimeter, but in recent months, climate without change reduced the spread of public attention A media agent increased persistence but there were no linkages between abatement and refugia Personal communication and park status dropped below natural levels The lawsuit may have referred to the next largest remnant, properties sorted by size, scattered matrices, the formation of a complex as well as the countless gaps Criterion A: The wood turtle taken on a voluntary basis Criterion B: The two-lined salamander plotted as two single bars SOURCE Text created from the following article: Anand M., Leithead, M., Silva, L., Wagner, C., Ashiq, M, Cecile, J., Drobyshev, I., Bergeron, Y., Das, A. and Bulger, C. (2013) The scientific value of the largest remaining old-growth red pine forests in North America. Biodiversity Conservation 22(8): 1847-1861 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT "Alienation (The Transferring of Title or of Interest)" from A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes. Copyright © 2015 by Madhur Anand. Reprinted by permission from McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House Canada. Previously published on Lemon Hound. Madhur Anand, a poet and a professor of ecology and environmental sciences at the University of Guelph, where she mixes poetic and scientific approaches to articulating current and impending crises
OTTO E. ECKERT STATION TAUNTS FIRE TO GRANDMOTHER She rises through nitrous oxide sunset greets the Boji Tower, greets it in persimmon sky, arrives in the fall of this late burning sun. Before her, coiling bolts of coal cooked air pour forth into diminishing light, slip and fade in opaque whisps. One street over in a sapling park, several geese lament the lost Oldsmobile plant. What song will rise to greet the final train load of Powder River Basin earth, when it arrives to be cooked up beneath the Eckert Station’s unfiltered bundle of shareholder ambition, pleasure, ambivalence. Landmarks, despite their poison are missed in the absences before and behind us, their ends the loss of measures to our traces left upon creation. Grandmother rises, her downward fixed gaze rests on the steady tumble of coal-fired smoke feeding a hundred-thousand air conditioners. SWALLOWS RUN FRANTIC AT THE WATER'S EDGE Trace the pathways of swallows, running veins atop Waabiishkiigo, criss-crossing whirlpools left by minnows, stalking the same hatch. Discarded, yellow ash leaves islands unto themselves crest and fall on this lake swollen past temperament by distant snowfalls, creation rising to meet creation Beyond us, northward our land peters out into shipping lanes, currents of sand, algae, driftwood. Each caress of this lake refreshes us, slows us Horizon holds mid-lake lighthouse, toilet shaped, blotting out Wheatley beyond. A lesson that lake freighters, pleasure boat fishermen, ignore in due course. The lake, creation moves slow. Swallows frantic atop it, us lazy on this beach, and the water rises, another freighter steams past lighthouse green moves atop high waves. MÀXKI SIPU I come to you as you squeeze into the cement culvert bisecting the heart of Springwells treaty land at fence line you stretch out to the horizons, beneath lowrise office buildings, straight as a slash of a shixikwe bite, still, as moments after the strike. Know your destination arrives at an island of fire, constant grumble of angry earth. Above us shopping cart rapids slow to glass top rifle of water, wailing past weeds, nènèskakw burst skyward from cracks in constricting shore. D.A. Lockhart is the author of Devil in the Woods (Brick Books, 2019) and Wenchikaneit Visions (Black Moss, 2019). His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2019, Grain Magazine, the Malahat Review, CV2, and Triquarterly among others. He holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University-Bloomington. Lockhart currently resides in the Souwesto region of Ontario where he splits time between Pelee Island and Waawiiyaatanong in Three-Fires Confederacy Territory. He is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.
|
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 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 Newsletter
Sign up for our Newsletter Archives
April 2021
Categories
All
|