Atmospheric Moon River

Abstract

These two long poems address both embodied and encultured experiences of climate change in the Kelowna region of the Okanagan Valley and the Salmon Arm region of the Shuswap in the British Columbia southern interior. Both poems grapple with the fear of future-oriented thinking in a time of climate catastrophe while registering the long historical dimensions that inform that present fear.

“Atmospheric Moon River” examines desire and beauty in the context of torrential rain and flooding that resulted in the deaths of several humans and many hundreds of farm animals. The poem updates old questions about the ethics of aesthetics when it comes to suffering in the present environmental context. The poem also draws a line from the first erotic love poem in English to the work of cultural theorists such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler and “classic” Hollywood cinema.  

“Sweet Air” links a story of personal illness and the loss of reproductive potential to the drama and climate anxiety of dramatically unseasonable weather. In “Sweet Air” the interlocutor of the poem has portions of her fallopian tubes removed to protect her from future illness resulting in the loss of an imagined future. That loss plays out against the backdrop of climate uncertainty and the resulting troubling of broader imagined futures.