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.
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si'ulq, pāni she takes me deep into her people’s land this stranger turned neighbour turned friend points out antelope brush and grey sage unwavering in summer heat spear grass clings to our skin as we wade through Lamb’s Quarter pulsing the want of seeds through Tufted Vetch and Shepherd’s Purse capped with rounded clusters while red-tailed hawks scratch the clouds above into the valley marked by bloodlines where dreams were swallowed whole we skirt ponds that give life to horned grebes, wigeons, and buffleheads spot a lone merganser and a common loon too early for blue heron to break the glazed surface we revel in the silent miracle of Water si'ulq, her mother would say pāṇī, my mother would say up the notched hills to watch wild horses roam free careless and cared for from a distance I learn palomino, bay, pinto, appaloosa they twitch not for us, but for the Sun xai'ałax, her mother would pray sūraj, my mother would cry and for the Moon sokemm, her mother would ebb chand, my mother would flow she takes me deep onto forest floors I’ve not known a cathedral of soft light we count the birds naks, usil, kałis, her mother would sing ik, dō, theen, my mother would recite walk beneath the watchful gaze of red-winged blackbirds and evening grosbeak there are no willows weeping nearby just the sound of a black-capped chickadee making its way home. Originally published in Prairie Fire Literary Magazine, vol. 42, no. 1, April 2021. UNDER THE BANYAN Nani-ji told us stories, long stories and made up stories, and maybe true stories of everything she knew of everything she’s gathered and named squatting under the banyan tree great-grandfather planted by the pond where the water buffalo bathed. She was shrivelled as an overripe mango, but once smooth as a clay pot. Her hands were caked with stories, her body brimming with stories upon stories seeded from the women and women-shaped absences before her. She told stories of a mouse who was mocked for hoarding rice in a hole, a wise mouse who knew the floods were coming, the rupture and decay looming. I wonder if she was that mouse. Nani-ji: maternal grandmother in the Punjabi family Originally published in Marias at Sampaguita Magazine, May 2021. Born in rural India, Moni Brar now divides her time between the unsurrendered territories of the Treaty 7 Region and the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Her writing explores the immigrant experience, diasporic guilt, and the legacy of trauma resulting from colonization. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and she is the winner of the 2021 SAAG Art’s Writing Prize, runner-up in PRISM international’s 2021 Grouse Grind Prize, shortlisted for Arc’s 2021 Poem of the Year, and a finalist in the 2021 Alberta Magazine Awards. Her writing can be found in The Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, Passages North, and Hobart, among others.
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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 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
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