Edited by Ingrid Wilson of Experiments In Fiction, the Hymnal is made gorgeous by a cover collage by Kerfe Roig. The book is a labor of love and gesture of intention from every voice captured on the Hymnal’s pages; each piece of writing shares a personal connection to the way climate change affects even the smallest life.
Writing my poem, I thought of the raging northwest fires and the mountain fire that sprang to life only miles from my home several years ago. The tang of smoke on the air ashes my heart. I thought of the masks and plastic gloves swirling in the ocean. As The Anthropocene Hymnal heads out into the world, I think of the heatwave this year has brought, of hurricanes, earthquakes, and flooding.
Writing my poem, I thought most of all of the water crisis at the America/Mexico border. This is the first event that brought the evidence of climate change strikingly into my life, as the border crisis sparked Thirst For Humanity. Thirst For Humanity took the form of a virtual gallery show, for which my mother painted pieces displaying her connection to water, with the art sales benefiting numerous organizations working to save immigrant lives.
I find natural disasters oddly beautiful. It is not the destruction that calls to me, but the sound and sight and rising smell. Those huge forest fires with pillars of tongue-flame orange blaze and rising clouds of smoke? The hurricanes with their hoopskirts of angry water, smashing flat the palm trees and reducing the shoreline to a sliver of darkness? Cracks in the earth, molten lava erupting; red-hot twists on a snake’s back?
These sights belong in writing and in painting. These smells belong in dreams and imaginings of fantasy worlds. I do not want them in my world, but they exist, creeping into knowledge, saying humanity is a dirty existence, and splashing their happening across our hearts.
The Hymnal, songs of a self-defining era, is a portrait of a cleaner relationship with earth. The rough hands of ignorance are gentling with awareness. Read an in-depth review here.
The sales of this book will benefit the WWF, an organization seeking to protect and conserve the diversity of life on earth. I give my words to the ongoing effort of reducing the impact of climate change.
The following is an excerpt of my poem, Save Your Tears for Another Day.
The horizon blisters
The moon melts in the icicles
Only the sun unwraps her cotton robe and
Bathes in a copper basin filled with
Diluted sweat. Today she
Calls it seawater . . .
I hope you savor the cries within this book and hear the pleas for intentional living. I hope you experience the dance of emotion and motion the songs in this book evoke and move beyond their tune to find your own. If you are so called, the Hymnal is available in paperback or ebook format via Amazon here.
Cover Art: New World by Kerfe Roig.
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