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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.
​                                                                The New Twenties
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.
                                                     
The Quarantine Review
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POETRY: JESSICA BEBENEK

12/10/2020

 
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

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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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