The collection takes its title from this poem’s last line: "Chauffer le dehors / Heating the Outdoors." The reprimand, “fermez la porte, on chauffe le dehors!” is a household refrain in the Canadian arctic tundra. “Shut the door!”—to keep out drafts, to keep in warmth. But in "Heating the Outdoors," the speaker sheds her protective layers, poem by poem, choosing vulnerability. The member of a displaced nation, here she stands in her ancestral territory with “all [her] doors and windows open,” radiating heat and light. Kristen Renee Miller on "The Future Shrugs" |
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Maya C. Popa: "In An Almost Time"
"The archaic nature of the word pestilence appealed to me....though I hadn’t consciously noted the affinity with silence, which is apt. Sentence too—quite. I fully believe and defer to the unconscious mind that hears what the poem needs or calls in (that sibilance). If we hold too tightly to the reigns of logic or control, we diminish the possibilities for mystery that, after all, are the truth of the matter, being at the heart of the human experience."
via BOMB |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Isabel Zapata (Mexico City) on Ecopoetry Now
"I wrote the book Una ballena es un país (translated as A Whale Is a Country by Robin Myers), in an attempt to say what the language of the academy and the language of activism hadn’t allowed me to say....I conceived this book as an invitation to challenge the boundaries between action and reality, between poetry and essays and stories, between the role we think we play on this planet and the role that climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction demand we take up." |
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