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. |
WHAT ABOUT THE WEATHER? 1. July 2, 2012, Vancouver, just after 7 pm. In 32 out of 49 United States temperatures are higher than ever recorded, a hundred and five, a hundred and seven, a hundred and nine or more.... In some TV places the air is un- conditioned, no longer homes there, where fires have demolished neighbour- hoods in Colorado Springs. Everything here is lush, soaked, just a little out of season. I can sleep — if I’ve walked, worked at my desk, felt loved by someone, but these days even love won’t assuage anxiety. It’s not just a globe that’s warming, it’s something else – a rise in obfuscation, a lilt of lies? Oil oozing over the map will be no surprise and even the rain won’t stop it now, (such small hands and all that talk is over) — citizens gloved and scared. 2. The summer of 2015, Vancouver, the rain did stop, at least for too long, April to October there was never enough. The shock of turning off the tap, just brush with a cup, do not wash your car, your bike, the shoes you wear, stand with the hose and let a little dribble quench the roses, that old hellebore still blooming, let moss die on stones, my steps stay dirty, neighbourhood vigilantes take their high road turns. The day of my party, a turning point in life, in weather, rain flooded the patio, the pool, the fancied guests. But we were only midway and our thirst was bigger than the rain—a modest spatter, enough for a rainbow, not enough to turn the clock back to that glory life, the one we thought we had forever. After starting out as a poet, short story writer, journalist (The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Stories, The Observer Magazine (UK), CBC, NFB), and co-author of several non-fiction books, Judith Penner spent a long time preoccupied with family, travel, teaching yoga and related workshops throughout India and North America, and her work as an editor. In recent years her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in catalogues (readymades, Smith Foundation), anthologies (Sustenance, Anvil Press), The Poetry Foundation, and in literary magazines, including Geist, Prism International, The Capilano Review online, and SubTerrain. Nomados published A Bed of Half Full: a landscape in 2018. She lives in Vancouver.
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.
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.
LAWSON ROY’S PINION ON SYN-THETIC POLYMERS Pity the bottom feeders! Lobster might look mighty but their numbers’ll drop faster than lead cod jigs. The clams n mussels lap up that nasty plastic crap drifts cross bottom. Nothin lobster likes more than a big feed of clams n mussels. I don’t differ—’d rather clams than lobster any day of the week. Was just up the Dairy Treat laid into a fine mess all fried up with French fries. Tasted the finest kind, if bites were a tad rubbery. Looked out cross the lot, saw a feathered ruckus floatin on the garbage barrel’s overflow —stupid gull, plastic fork stuck bent in its beak an onion ring ringin its neck. I would’ve pulled that fork outta there so ol greedy-guts crazy-head could enjoy its fried treat but you think that damned bird would sit still? * * * A damn sin, the trash the tide heaps on the beach. Out walkin, you come cross banged-up buoys or bits mangled traps, trap tags n bands, cartons n tainers pop cans n enough bottles for every last blasted soul chunks of Sty-ro-foam, Zip-loc bags, what we call penny whistles. Birthday balloons lookin like run-over jellyfish. In all colours! Bait bags, shell casins, their rubber gloves. All colours! When I was fishin Millie always made me my mitts. Weren’t nothin syn-theticful—nothin but sheep’s wool. They’d tighten from dunkin em in the salt ocean each trip. Waterproofin. Some warm. With the finger in em for firin the .22 on board in case we run up on any seals. * * * You ever seen that bit on the television? They’re out in the boat and the young fella’s wonderin what to do with his chip bag or gum wrapper or somethin or other, and the old fella he says to just toss er overboard. But where does it go, Dad? Away, son; away. Well, well now. Where the heck’s away to? Some hazy Atlantic nowhere? That fog’s comin in fast though. Can feel it fillin my chest, layin on a few extra oil-based coats. Water molly-cules and an-ti-thetic syn-thetics fillin my cavities sure as I’m breathin tumbled round, broke-down poly-sty-rene. Nothin much you buy lasts anymore, credibly quick to break. Then it’s broke it lasts and lasts and lasts and won’t ever rot! Oh, you know people—don’t they love that ol beach glass. Started makin necklaces outta the stuff, like it’s pearls! That busted glass is a bunch of trash—way I see it, the start of a terrible habit. Pieces can be pretty, sure—so! No need. Pretty as a Coke can. Go get yourself wed with a lobster band. Har-huh-hargh! They tell me it’s all the tobacco I smoked but I know it’s this fake plastic fog the ocean’s pushin. Dig up my lungs 50 years from now, you’ll find a pair of bags fit for carryin your poisoned groceries home in. Cory Lavender is a white privileged poet of Black Loyalist descent living in Nova Scotia, which is in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. His work has appeared in journals such as Riddle Fence, The New Quarterly, and The Dalhousie Review. His chapbook Lawson Roy’s Revelation came out with Gaspereau Press in 2018. A second chapbook, Ballad of Bernie “Bear” Roy, is forthcoming with knife | fork | book.
Sarah Mangle's work is peopled with beautifully flawed characters. Her work is concerned with growth, feelings, shaky lines and truth-telling. Sarah is white and queer and grew up in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada. Sarah Mangle’s bookworks, postcards and zines are sold internationally. Her large format felt works have been exhibited locally in Montreal, where she has resided on and off since 2000. Sarah Mangle's work has been featured in the Globe and Mail, Hello Giggles, Shameless Magazine, Art/iculations, The Montreal Review of Books, Nat Brut and Broken Pencil. Sarah Mangle is currently working on a comic about the lesbian-owned import export store in her small hometown and her teenage attempt to be hired there. It is set to be published in an anthology with Conundrum Press in 2020. She curates a comic and zine distro at Depanneur Le Pick Up and makes ongoing comic work about the benign cyst in her brain.
Social Media Things: Instagram + Facebook: @sarahmangle |
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
|