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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.

...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.
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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.
                                                     
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The Quarantine Review
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Watch Your Head is on hiatus until 2023. Check back for submission details in the new year.

Poetry: Jacqueline Valencia

9/22/2019

 
AND YET

It was 1989 when our music television station went green to join a cause that had become
the topic du jour: the environment, Greenpeace, and rock n roll.

Earth day videos of toxic waste dumps, co2 emissions, and hair spray that held crowns up 
had to be put down. "Look at what we're doing, Jane," they said as images of sad polar bears, dying seal pups (appropriated), streamed by as we anxiously scribbled protest signs, planted trees at school, and felt for the first time that we could make something happen beyond cynicism and Ferris Bueller. 

U2, World Party, Peter Gabriel, Sting,The Boss, Sinead "O'Fucking Yes" O'Connor, Chrissie Hynde, in concert. Watch it live and donate now to the Earth! "We gotta do something now, John," we said, and somehow the corps made us believe we were not pretending to care because it was a real cool party and we were just dancing politics.

That was it. A day every year we try to recreate the moment, and all this time we had been clogging up our oceans with their plastic, still 
our air with their acid fumes, still,
spilling their, our, whatever, oil, still
in lakes and directly on endangered birds as if we didn't learn anything and somehow a lot of us forgot how to use our legs.

It's 2019
​complacent and complicit we are
and the new kids, scream blame and hope,
all at once, so empowered
through inherited black smoke

Now we're finally listening?
"There is no invitation to this show, people,"
we should all be there.


Jacqueline Valencia is a Toronto-based writer, editor, and critic. She is the author of  Lilith (Desert Pets Press, 2018) and There Is No Escape Out Of Time (Insomniac Press, 2016). Current projects include: Writer's residency at Poetry InPrint (poetry and printmaking), Fuck This Place (novel-in-progress) and planning the second Poetry Talks: Racism and Sexism in the craft (pending 2020).  Jacqueline is a full-time maid, and the mother to two wonderful teenagers. jacquelinevalencia.wordpress.com



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    Watch Your Head is an online journal of creative works devoted to the climate crisis and climate justice. 

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