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. |
LOVELETTERS TO THE DEEP My eyes & conscience are clear. I filled my backpack with rocks & loveletters to the deep & swung it into the lake. I grew up with hardened shoreline instead of sand between my toes. Myths become less plausible every day. Mermaids pulling twist ties from their gills & kraken choking on plastic bags mistaken for squid, limbs shredded by propellers. Oil slicked wings hold no air, no matter the skies they fold into themselves. Rivers choked with plastic like my father’s arteries, dredged from the bones of sleeping giants, cling wraps the voice to my throat for a species that worships gods of convenience. I sunk a knife into a tree trunk & it bled. I tore open my calf on a rusted nail & tried to stop the sap leaking through my fingers. I raised a rifle to my shoulder, shot the expectant moon & felt the spray on my cheek. Felt the sky recoil. I set fire to the sea & built palaces of salt. Our futures have gone from picket fences to picket lines. Youth is its own burden. I explain to an old white man why having children would feel immoral, & he suggests I trust that they will fix this, as if that was not what his generation already did. Blind faith in false gods, hope an offering left at their shrines. Myths become less plausible every day. My eyes & conscience are clear. Qurat Dar (she/they) is a spoken word performer, poet, multi-genre writer, and environmental engineering student. She has had work in Augur Magazine, The Temz Review, and Anathema Magazine, among others. Qurat was a 2019 recipient of the Ron Lenyk Inspiring Youth Arts Award and is a Best of the Net finalist. She was also recently crowned the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam (CIPS) National Champion. Their debut poetry chapbook is forthcoming with Coven Editions.
Find them on Instagram: @itsnotquart and Twitter: @itsnotquart NOTES TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOCENE FABLE AT A RUSSIAN SAUNA IN MISSISSAUGA Rumpelstiltskin’s first wife, I enter and exit the steam room in a eucalyptus cloud. My rumpled robe scratches. Silt rises to skin surface. I scrub my pores with sea salt. I pull a rusted chain and a wooden bucket tips cool torrent on my head. No one in these microclimates has a name big enough for forests, for air. I am trying to outrun my recurring daymare, the one with the turret. This olive string bikini, once sinuous, is now only fit for sweating myself alive. I beg a sauna man in a wool cap to wave his parched birch wand. My inner bitch wakes up, whining. I haven’t fed her in too long. My cells realign themselves, spread around. I eavesdrop on the heat, practice different pronunciations. He ate, she ate, we ate all the sun’s treats, licked black seeds from slit vanilla beans, plucked gold croaks from toad throats. I am trying to escape the king’s wealth, the kind that slashes and slinks through holes. I get to stay here longer than all the white rhinos, the bees. Will I hand a firstborn to the burn? Infused with cedar scent, buzzing, I lower myself into a barrel of glacial water. I imagine a cryogenic prince charming carrying me, limp, into the next ice age. Soothed, I shower. Calmer and slower, I sit in the tea room afterward, drinking vodka and kombucha, replenishing my salt sea with pickle brine. A television screens our ever after, a nature documentary about bleached coral reefs, all those fabulous bows and rainbows frozen white in the sunshine. Originally published in PRISM International (Issue 57.4: Spring 2019) Catriona Wright is the author of the poetry collection Table Manners (Véhicule Press, 2017) and the short story collection Difficult People (Nightwood Editions, 2018). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Walrus, Fiddlehead, and Lemon Hound, and they have been anthologized in The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and in The Best Canadian Poetry 2015 & 2018.
HOLLOW cars pass through the tainted streetlights of suburbia while racoons ravage through yesterday’s trash and crickets talk to the trees “where did all those bees go?” and leaves lazily linger on branches and sparrows speak of a future somewhere sometime when the racoons retire from trashcan diving and the crickets cry and the trees try to bring back the bees because cars passed through and homes were built brick after brick on top of nests and nestles one after the other until one day home was as hollow as a bird bone Lauren Lee is a graduate from Western University with a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing. She writes creative non-fiction and poetry; her work has been published in Iconoclast (2020) Occasus Literary Journal (2018).
SURVIVING THE CATASTROPHE 1 The rough beasts crash and lumber, scales flashing, brilliant in the falling sun. When they swing their great heads, this way, and that, scanning for danger, we still ourselves. We are but notions beavering into shadows, biding time, too small to merit even their disdain. They rise up fiercely tall and stupid, then slouch off toward Washington, Jerusalem, Beijing, Berlin, Moscow, claiming for themselves, this devastated paradise, raging at the meteoric gods. We flee from the Jurassic chaos into tunnels of anticipated spring. Huddled, nibbling ideas--their roots, their rotting leaves– we sip our wine, and craft a plan: first we take New Mexico. Then we take our time. [1] The poem is based on the life of Kimbetopsalis simmonsae, a small, herbivorous, beaver-like mammal that survived the event that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Its fossil was found in what is today New Mexico. A veterinary epidemiologist, David Waltner-Toews has published more than 20 books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. His most recent book (nonfiction) is On Pandemics: Deadly Diseases from Bubonic Plague to Coronavirus (Greystone, 2020). His poetry books have been published by McClelland and Stewart, Brick Books, and Turnstone Press. More information can be found on his website: https://davidwaltnertoews.wordpress.com/
PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM No one kept watch, except all of us. We made human chains we wrote operas we conducted interviews and released the data and started smoking again, bought up everything we could just to stop it, it didn’t we found hope anyway then lost the case, we lay on our backs and just floated. We saw 150 species a day go extinct we did not want to be people we were tired of talking we started singing we said maybe it’s over, we delivered a formal apology to the salmon did a controversial pregnant photoshoot in front of a nuclear reactor, all those nice curves we made page 15 of the New York Times, ok and delighted in the letters to the editor that said I was ‘going to give my baby cancer’ well exactly then got scared and moved but it was everywhere we went like my unstable worth rolling oblongly on pink shadows of information glamping among the facts. Friends came and were astronomies. Self-deploying flora volunteered. This morning the sun of god shone on the chasmogamous violets and the world continues in great detail. What shall I do with my information I’m an animal in an animal in an animal I’m a poem of objects that live by magic* I’m every idea I ever had, I’ll just stay here as a person. I have a photographic mouth * Anna Mendelssohn WORLD WAR Thinking is my fighting, said Virginia Woolf, in the middle of war Are we in the middle of war A war with the sea A war with the air Who will wear what the world wore Lucid and wetly speaking There’s no war you idiots learn the language hot pink sex you don’t need money Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. Her debut collection of poetry, Rag Cosmology (Book*hug), won the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and her work has been published in Lemon Hound, Vallum, The Capilano Review, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, among others. Collaborative performance works with Hanna Sybille Müller and Andréa de Keijzer include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; revolutions; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies (forthcoming spring 2020, at Tangente). Originally from Cortes Island, Erin lives in Montréal.
DEER I wanted to write a poem about a deer but by the time I got around to it, I think it was probably already dead. I guess that makes this an elegy. I watched it through the chain-link fence with my fingers clawed around the diamond-outline of its metal- etched body, darting through the crooks of electrical towers. No, he was a stag, big, with antlers, and with ink- deep eyes that I could look into and I would feel them like he was looking into me and not bleating with his eyes shut. He kept reeling around on his two back legs and his soft browns looked grey like the grass and the pile of concrete cylinders to the right. His nose kept spraying out these puffs of hot sleet and there was all this steam coming off his back. I could see the meat pulsing around his bones. I wanted to call someone to catch him, help him, or—I wanted to grab someone’s arms hard and tell them he needed help. I wanted to press my palms flat on his wet, shaking body. I wanted to help him. Instead, I watched him smack his hooves off a path of broken asphalt slabs and disappear down the drooping rows of thick black cables. Previously published in The Rusty Toque, Nov. 2013 Jessica Bebenek is a writer, bookmaker, & interdisciplinary artist living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. Her creative work can be found in PRISM, Prairie Fire, CV2, Arc, and Grain, among other places. Her third poetry chapbook, Fourth Walk, was published by Desert Pets Press in 2017, and her collection of knitting patterns for poems, k2tog, was released by Berlin’s Broken Dimanche Press in 2019. She works as a writer, teacher, and bookmaker, and is currently completing a full-length poetry collection, No One Knows Us There.
@notyrmuse www.jessicabebenek.art THESE ELEPHANTS IN CANADA I memory is a mammoth failure a trauma dream a Zoroastrian declaiming upon a dead star weeping on a palimpsest of archipelagos on all that remains land written upon by rising seas animals run to land when the sea spills over its speech II overwhelmed by rising I spill my coffee onto the once fecund table as it pools disorder into the shape of an elephant’s ear I gaze into the lifeless dream to hear a scattering of sound reflection III alive a brown melted glacier going tidal the hot ocean of this elephant’s sneeze a disorder of all senses uncaging unguent memories drip out into the void of human space Gregory Betts is the author of Sweet Forme (2020), a collection of visual renderings of the sound patterns in Shakespeare’s sonnets (published by Australia’s Apothecary Archive, available here: https://bit.ly/383XaTl). He is the digital curator of bpNichol.ca and a poet-professor at Brock University. His next book is Finding Nothing: Vancouver Avant-Garde Literature, 1959-1975, due out in February 2021 with University of Toronto Press.
FLAGPOLES AT THE OLD EXPO GROUNDS jogger shoes flap flap flap bike chains jingle skateboards rush push on and on words surge to phone faces to laces no, I know, but it’s something I’ve really noticed a language I can’t understand the bolt of weeds through planks the mark of orange plastic cones a couple on yellow steps watch a play on a rotting stage its clatter of empty flagpoles its loom of concrete stadium once the water’s edge now Edgewater Casino spinning wheels spinning Highway ’86 yachts, trucks, ATVs giant Swiss-watch McBarge world in motion world in touch press on, carry on, keep on odds on asphalt odds on helicopter odds on geodesic I don’t think the psychiatrist warned them they thought they heard the deer they felt they were similar just look at the criteria look at the architecture the water’s push against land their nightclub they wanted to, they wanted very much they rallied, they studied, they held summits yet they knew they weren’t for plants they weren’t for wildlife videos they were for the stage they were on track for the house edge Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking won a BC Book Award for Poetry, Nightmarker was a finalist for a Vancouver Book Award, and Recipes from the Red Planet was a finalist for a BC Book Award for fiction. You can also find her work in Best Canadian Poetry 2009 and 2018. Her fourth book of poetry, Lullabies in the Real World, was published in 2020 by NeWest Press. From 2014 to 2016, she was the Poetry Mentor at Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio Program.
FOXES IN MICHIGAN hundreds of pelts drip off a flatbed truck spilling faces and paws velvety tongues within our reach flap in the backdraft to the mouth of the mighty Route 66 their innards still pastel pink like Johnson’s baby oil bottles sticky from slaughter dried musk-laden riverbeds lead us to distant edges splendid piles of matted fur splayed voyageurs just foraged in the woods below hawks’ nests not knowing their future hides tanned, skins cured suspended in a forever-sleep of glass-bead eyes dashed hopes and highway lines Archana Sridhar is a poet and university administrator living in Toronto. Archana focuses on themes of meditation, race, motherhood, and diaspora in her poetry and flash writing. Her work has been featured in The Puritan, Barren Magazine, The /tƐmz/ Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook "Renderings" is available through 845 Press, and her writing can be found at www.archanasridhar.com.
LE TEMPS DES CERISES Massacre in my kitchen, the counter spatter incarnadine, my hands bloodied with the juice of cherries splayed, gutted, for dessert at a friend’s; my fingers dyed a red that keeps in the fine creases, under the nails, through the next day’s breakfast, lunch. I tremble to sacrifice none of this, even though the cherries, local, organic, spoke to me, insisting on their innocence, the plump, burgundy wholeness of them. I didn’t think to spare them, never do; not them, nor the shrimp I clean for my son’s home-coming dinner, each shrimp life given up, given over to our celebration. Deeper into that same night I hear, through my open window, close, someone else’s baby cry – such grief, and nothing will ease it, not the breast or rest or warmth or darkness or light; nothing will ease it forever and ever or for the long moment till all is well and silent. We can’t help ourselves: who wouldn’t trade their own child’s comfort for another’s harm, another child’s harm? We can’t help ourselves, knowing it’s wrong, knowing there would be a remedy if we wanted it. Now someone has written a book I won’t be reading, about how the Earth would do without us, rewriting not the past (airbrushing Trotsky out of the Stalin snaps), but the future; a projection sans project-er. It’s getting hotter, we’re starting to agree we’ve fucked it up. The review says the author has visited fresh ruins, a city abandoned only decades, and it’s easy to foretell: bougainvillea purpling rooftops, the small fingers of roots diligently rubbing out difference. No inside; no out. To some perhaps it’s comforting to think of the Earth scratching at its ear (good dog!) and us no more than fleas in its coat: a good scrub, a sprinkling of powder and all is well again. None mourning our self- massacre, not the cherries gone wild, the gleeful shrimp gaining, all we consumed. He imagines furthermore humpbacks releasing their arias without contest, butterflies sculpting air. I don’t want to. Useless though my own life has seemed to me at times (despite cherries, despite friends), I want this curious project to continue, our certain hunger, our subtleties, our complicated contradictions. The arias less necessary to me than the way a mouth is held, the look in an eye, that engenders them. Though my own evaluation of the human is that, as the song goes, you can’t have one without the other. Previously published in All Souls’ Véhicule Press, 2012 Rhea Tregebov’s seventh collection of poetry, All Souls’, was published in 2012. Her poetry has received the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, Honorable Mention for the National Magazine Awards, and the Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry from Prairie Schooner. Tregebov is also the author of two novels, Rue des Rosiers and The Knife-Sharpener’s Bell, as well as five children’s picture books. Having retired from her position in the Creative Writing Program at University of British Columbia teaching in June 2017, she is now an Associate Professor Emerita.
JAILED TREE in the water before the eye said brother barbed wire tree mine of bone who flashed bland sea for bargain can’t return a banished house or tiny mineral father couldn’t lose a follow brother singing another wind tune grows out of trench a trailing sea pried open grey city woman smells like orphan and sweat a small muscle world a kind of thick pouring chaining hush of voices circling up sky "Jailed Tree" first published in R2: the Rice Review. BREATH FOR GUAN YIN 1. brought to pond 10,000 steps a hum each cascade of yellow tile supported by sturdy red one metal figure waiting on water to quiet mind’s battle metallic rain horde means fill your bathtub cook all food no water in grocery store gas station line to empty crush of leftover white cardboard boxes floorlength we unpack lift boxes higher no bathing no showering do we have an axe? a tight set of drawers in lungs slow a breath for ritual smoke open late door and friend a shoe on busy rack enter already-breathing room one hundred golden figures sitting in perch each sewn seat in neat place considering attic a man walks in front of watching window no shoes we could second each foot slowly again again floor it a message says to knock on airbnb door 2. man or woman? man or woman? no other options at check-in ladies or jocks? no time for questions 11 size sneakers pair of grey shorts woman’s blouse children’s shoes what size? line of eagers at distribution line all-day Rice University students writing orders fill big blue bags sort through assembly walkers toothbrushes pillows blankets a hot commodity special line form to right ‘don’t you Mister me!’ I see who wanted ladies’ shoes repeating request ‘I’m not a Mister! I’m not a Mister!’ & no response before turning away from line toward a line of beds volunteer supervisor no time for questions I write on post-it note please no assumptions please respect please no time for questions 3. friend said ‘all the aunties chanting’ brought me green one sound four meanings I enter inflection meaning mother not horse meaning guide sits sings lesson from diverging mouth chemical cloud ping pings a hot, rushing air all bodies in yard humming in mind thick infection in head can’t say I broke much trying not to ingest 10,000 hurricane microbes let go spider tendrils 4. at the lost and found eyeglasses a credit card note left at desk because no cell phone woman in wheelchair checks in again about no cell phone cold boxed pizza white-haired unshaven’s waded through waters wants help calling FEMA from Louisiana to Katrina lost bags maybe at last shelter lost daugher or son back in LA we roll through shelter names and phone number I inhale smoke dial disembodied numbers to receive heart knows how to attach sister in empty seat how to cling worthy ache how to bring down rain why chant dead grandmothers into room animal set loose in chest only one a believer and other a cook preparing food for hungry repentants 5. when street drains is there pressure in street all notes escaping injure to try not exhume breath from body walk away from dead night throw arms to air hoping for birds to land "Breath for Guan Yin" first published in Spiral. Ching-In Chen is author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017; winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as the chapbooks how to make black paper sing (speCt! Books, 2019) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2020 and a Finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award). Chen is also the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011; AK Press 2016) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press, 2009). They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat and Imagining America and are a part of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. A community organizer, they have worked in Asian American communities in San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside, Boston, Milwaukee and Houston. www.chinginchen.com
SEED CATALOGUE FOR THE END DAYS Orange Sun Peppers – Drought tolerant. Bitter Gourd – Heavily warted green skin; excellent adaptation to environmental stresses. Eden White Corn – Requires isolation from other corn. Good for home garden or barter. Serengeti Bush Bean – Resistant to Bacterial Brown Spot, Common Bean Mosaic Virus, Anthracnose, Benzene, Mercury. Bulls Blood Beet – Holds up well under long-term storage. Atomic Red Carrot – Grows in ash. First published in Grain Summer 2019. Susan Haldane is a writer and editor in Northeastern Ontario. She and her husband run a grass-based livestock farm, and their farmhouse front porch looks south to Algonquin Park. Her poetry has been published in a number of Canadian journals, and her chapbook Picking Stones is with Gaspereau Press.
UNPRECEDENTED Tuesday: Rediscovering a mangled manuscript, a first draft of who we wanted to be. You skimmed it like you remembered; We have time now I wanted to say We read what we could, slanted patterns of youthful cursive: shopping malls swelling into seed libraries bullet trains with bright red seats workdays like hibernating hummingbirds fucking for more than three minutes without falling asleep When you spoke of home, it was sliced whispers from an orca who sang you to sleep Who are we again? you asked, a drumfire revolted twenty kilometres away Remembering Spanish protesters imitating our hearts, I want to be forgotten we read You lay down and I did too I read you every word until you recognized us, Untitled melted dry on the first page And the world spun into the unprecedented as we constituted our antidote to the rising Salma Saadi is a social worker and a writer. She has been published in Untethered Magazine, Sewer Lid, and Plenitude Magazine. In 2019, she participated in Writer’s Studio, a writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity.
BORDERS Nothing’s different. The things that were here before are here now. The men whose mouths move and make angry sounds - they were here. They growled. The sounds are loud and empty spaces where words were excised. Words lean on walls in the detention room. They seem aimless, but they’re making plans. They’ve been locked up before. They snuck in scissors and cut shadow words to throw through the bars, set free to assemble and organize to take the horrors down. These are bad times. But they’re not so different from before. "Borders" appeared in the pamphlet from Happy Monks Press, “How the End Comes”, 2019 CARE PACKAGE I used to care, but that was in the free days, the ones between the named days, the ones without numbers and holidays. The way it went was: a person walked across an invisible border, through gullies, ditches, other dips in the land. Weather was brutal, its length meant cold took fingers. That guy in the news knew the story went only to the end of care. Past that, fingers fell, care rolled up the rim, and the charter bus rolled back to the land of the free. The wolves curled up under cold trees and learned the sound of no-howl, no-growl, their minds loud with the crackle of celestial sheets of light. Their care made sound go underground, into tunnels of ears and animal minds. This is when care went incognito to the hunters, but the language in the wolves’ minds grew. I used to care, but that was in the loud days. I made it sound worse and better than it was, and dug a hole under the tree, in the ditch and divot, and this is where the unnamed held dormant in the winter snow, pushing down its seed for the longest, endless hope. Alice Burdick is a poet, author of four collections, one selected, and many chapbooks and other micro-press publications. Her work, in the form of poems and essays, has appeared in many anthologies, and she also works as an editor and in the schools through Poetry in Voice/Les Voix de la Poesie. She co-owned the former Lexicon Books in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, musician, and multidisciplinary artist and has published 25 books of fiction, poetry and work for children. His latest books include For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco, and Ampers&thropocene (visuals) and A Cemetery for Holes (with Tom Prime). A new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy will appear from Random House in 2021. He currently WiR at Sheridan College. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com |
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
Categories
All
|