Roots Water Concrete

"Roots Water Concrete" is a book by two contributors; writer Brice Woodcock (twitter/website) & artist Jonathan Zachary (instagram). Brice says that they "wrote these poems over the course of ten years. The anthropocentric planet sometimes feels like something huge, lonely, and invasive, and it is hard not to fantasize about buildings and roads being swallowed up by the ground. Then I soak my feet in the dirt and smell the sunlight so I can see my fellow humans as more than parts of an unfeeling machine, as people as lost here as I am.". 'Anthropocentric' apparently means "a belief that human beings are the most important entity; before animals, nature, and before (any) God". It's interesting I never knew that, but it's a good word to describe the mentality that capitalism pushes us towards. Nothing matters except human success. Not survival, not equality, not safety - success. I appreciate the work that this book puts into not becoming nihilistic or cynical despite the norms of society. Think of this as the opposite of Grimes's latest album. Instead of a fascist, accelerationist, or eugenicist response to the rate that CORPORATIONS and the WEALTHY are destroying the earth and blaming it on the entire population, this chapbook addresses the reality that many humans do care, and human life still does matter, even if it isn't superior to the point of being justification for harm done to all non-human life.

Something that I love about what they do is that they put the title of the poems at the bottom of the page. Small stuff like that isn't new, but you don't see it often and I definitely think playing with poetic format is really great and fun. That they collaborated with an artist to give every poem a unique illustration as a companion really stands out. Several of them are of an extremely impressive quality. It does take awhile. The book starts out angry at other humans, almost blaming them for things that are truly the fault of a much bigger system than individual actions. But it matures as you go through the story it tells you. It talks about architecture, cities, technology, populations, vehicles, chemicals, emissions, and all the urban aspects that serve as reminders to the altercations we've made to living. In a certain way, the way we "live" now is more a different type of "death" but that isn't a permanent fate, and hopelessness can't save us. It's important to read these ten years of "imperfect" or even "concerning" fantasies, because they show a maturity of realizing that the engagement with climate change is necessary but that nihilistic-assholery only comes from the people who never valued their own lives or the lives of other people outside their small (western) world anyways. 

It looks great and it tells a VERY needed alternate mentality to the reality of environmental focus in the development in the future. Here's to facing the fantasies of human elimination, and coming out understanding the significance of all the lives we can't see.

"Once between some walls where they pay me to masticate and spit food up into the open mandibles of twitching scaly creatures for less than a living wage A man in a beige cardigan said I was gifted at scooping his ice cream into a cup I wanted to stab him with the ice cream spoon"

[CW // ecopessimism, car accidents. vomiting, suicide]