Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN & Climate Justice Toronto. |
Watch Your Head
Coach House Books, 2020 Paperback 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. Cover design by Ingrid Paulson ...Watch Your Head does not disappoint. It serves as a warning to heed, a reminder to be thought of often, and a well-thought-out piece of art. Throughout the anthology, readers encounter pieces that provoke and insist, demanding attention, consideration, action, and creativity. Essays and stories and images alike bring about questions and statements on Indigenous rights, white privilege, exploitation of land and people, colonial power structures, place, home, language, and imagination. |
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. Buy WATCH YOUR HEAD from these booksellers
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! |
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.
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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 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
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