Carbon Capture and Stories

Nothing is more difficult than making sense of the loss of meaning, yet nothing is more urgently necessary. For the forests burn and the wetlands dry up, and myth and poetry, twins born from their mysteries, fade into obscurity. Without them, and the dreams they are made of, we are captured by carbon, and the prose of inevitability replaces the poetry of hope. Raising the standard of poetry and myth, this collection once more makes sense of the loss of meaning, resists their fading away, and reminds us that, in saving our woods and wetlands, we save our stories and ourselves, too.

-Sascha Engel, Plant Anarchy

Dawid Juraszek bends the ancient world of mythology into a singularity of climate change-not through mythological giants like Gilgamesh, Antigone, or Aphrodite-but in the poem "Ishtar Descending to the Underworld," a poetic response to a modern world: "Through the first gate / gone were her wetlands // through the second / her old-growth forests" and then go to free-flowing rivers, coral reefs, grasslands, and glaciers. Still, what might seem like background in this mythological world is foreground in "Had She Asked Him," the seven-part series that balances humanity's reality in the immediate presence of carbon capture.

-Sandra Fluck, The Write Launch

Poems rattle off the page in short, unfettered staccato bursts. The words bleed into each other and offer the reader a philosophical pointillism where each phrase and fractured sentence are cumulative, building layers of meaning forcing the reader to modify their understanding. Totally fascinating.

-Jack Caradoc, Dreich