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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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. |
BUSHFIRE There is one road in and out – mountain to sea and back again. We take it while we still can, trail the steady line of traffic climbing towards a choked sky. Streams only travel in one direction or dry up in heatwaves such as this. The temperatures are still rising. Last night, as the children slept, we watched light streak across the sky illuminating our shack on the hill – the back steps built close to jagged shrubs and grass. This morning we packed everything and left, shoved pink flip-flops and beach-balls into the boot, headed north. We saw flames above the trees. By nightfall that road was blistered, nothing but a scorched leaf-littered underpass, a net for fiery embers and sparks. Burning strips of eucalypt bark leapt from one side of the black lake to the other. We watch the news, recognise place names, on digital maps, not meant for tourists. We walked those beaches where huge groups gather, waiting for the ferocious fires to burn themselves out, return again to ash-dusted patches of land. BARGAINING When life comes down to a headspace of air beneath a jetty – the atmosphere toxic – and above swirling tornadoes of fire, the house burning down to the ground, trees glowing scarlet in the haze, hissing, spitting out sparks, and a fireball sun beaming yellow, eucalypts exploding under a Mercurian orange-streaked sky – you cling to wood, cling to your grandchildren, let the youngest lock fingers around your neck, her blonde curls bobbing on the cold surface, her eyes wide, lips a thin, pale line – wonder where their mother is, if she’s praying, check for five heads above water. Make your case. Stephanie Conn is a poet and current PhD Researcher from Northern Ireland. Her first collection The Woman on the Other Side (Doire Press, 2016) was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award for Best First Collection. Her pamphlet Copeland’s Daughter (Smith/Doorstep, 2016) won the Poetry Business Poetry Competition. Her most recent collection Island was published by Doire Press in 2018. Stephanie is a multi-award winning poet, including the inaugural Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. She is the recipient of a range of Arts Council awards and has read her work locally, nationally and internationally. Find out more at https://stephanieconn.org/. Follow @StephanieConn2
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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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