Books

Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency

Guardian Book of the Year, 2021

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, Autumn 2021

Poetry School Book of the Year, 2021

‘The best eco-themed anthology to emerge this year.’

Rishi Dastidar, Guardian

‘Out of Time challenges, inspires, and empowers us to change our world.’

Mark Maslin, author of How to Save Our Planet (Penguin) & Professor of Earth System Science, UCL

‘The ardency and urgency of this selection set it apart from much of what is published about the living world.’

Sara Hudston, Times Literary Supplement

‘A transformative read.’

Dalijt Nagra, Chair of the Royal Society of Literature

This powerful, timely anthology engages with the power of poetry to ask questions, subvert expectations and raise reader awareness in 2021 – the start of a decade defined by responsibility, accountability and opportunity.

Out of Time is curated to include five key thematic sections, each sequenced to take readers on a journey through various responses to climate emergency, from Emergency, Grief and Transformation, through to Work and Rewilding. The featured poems move through anger, confusion, violence and disarray – spheres of dystopia and decimation – to grief, desperation and lethargy, right through to modes of transformation, fable and utopia as well as rites of passage, activism and work. Finally, we land on tender (if fragile) moments of hope, where humans can be both included or excluded from the picture at will.

Edited with an insightful introduction by Kate Simpson and featuring original work from the likes of Caroline Bird, Inua Ellams, Pascale Petit, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Rachael Allen, Raymond Antrobus, Gboyega Odubanjo and Mary Jean Chan, this collection of 50 poems is galvanising, offering compressed worlds, ecosystems and alternate realities – all ready to be opened up, expanded and explored.