Fossil — Maya Chowdhry

Fossil explores planet earth as she experiences anthropogenic climate change, it examines the impacts of climate chaos and the resultant implications of climate justice for the human species. The collection takes its subject seriously through a playful testing of language.

Voices of plants, trees, fossils, rocks, bodies of water and creatures speak about the human impacts on the climate of our planet. Interspersed with these poems are poems exploring some of the reasons that the earth is being exploited for capital by humans and what this means for all life on earth. Birds, insects and other plants comment on how humans are enslaving them for their gain.

The false selling of constellations, what scientists might be releasing when they core into the ice caps and a war over a glacier are all topics for this collection that interrogates the scientific, transmuting the language through the feathers of an albatross, the sap of a Spider Orchid, a Banksia dentata seed bursting into life.

“When Maya Chowdhry told me she’d been commissioned to make a chapbook about climate change, I got so excited. This is an artist who sees in the round. The connectedness of everything from race, geographies, gender, nature, beauty, oppression, love, subtlety, politics and anger. The climate movement in the global north is all too dominated by white people who all too often sideline the vital and effective insights of people of colour living here who have it all connected up, effortlessly, like breathing.”

Jane Trowell