I’ll Get Right On It
Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis
Poetry by and for working people making a living under conditions of climate disaster.
About the book
The deepening climate crisis is making all kinds of work harder, more dangerous and more unpredictable — or if it hasn’t yet, it will soon enough. And all kinds of workers have something to say about it. I’ll Get Right On It is a poetry anthology about making a living and carrying on despite smoky air, fires, climate grief, species loss and increased precarity. Contributors include Indigenous, migrant, racialized, low-income, queer, disabled and unpaid labourers who do all kinds of work, including climate-related work, extractive work, migrant work, gig work, care and service work and traditional work.
This anthology builds on the rich traditions of working-class literature, work poetry and social poetics. These poems are both a way to pay attention to the politics of everyday life and a workshop for building solidarity among working people already surviving and adapting to a climate emergency. They surface the commonplace, powerful feelings of cynicism, helplessness, empathy, responsibility, resilience and hope that are needed in the struggle for a liveable future. Connecting the dots between labour and environment, this anthology invites us to think and feel through the many ways climate change transforms our working lives.
What people are saying
Tom Wayman, author of If You’re Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free: Literature and Social Change“Poems in I’ll Get Right On It arise from inside a wide slice of the workforce: a massage therapist, postie, teacher, sandblaster, even an invasive vegetation management technician. A call centre employee muses how people waiting endlessly on hold to have a problem solved are like how we’re all waiting for “the fix” for climate change. A fisherman pens a new folk tune lamenting how a proposed mine’s tailings will impact the salmon on which his livelihood depends. Presenting a more accurate picture of where we are as a society than either greenwashing corporate-speak or the environmental end-time doomsters, the voices of those whose jobs each day actually rebuild the world as it changes are well worth a listen.”
Madhur Anand, Governor General’s Literary Award-winning writer and Director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability Laboratory, University of Guelph“An essential contribution to climate change literature, this book advances climate justice with voices not typically brought to the table. The urgency articulated in these itinerant voices is impossible to unhear, and, I hope, impossible to ignore.”
Jill MacIntyre, 350 Canada national organizer“A moving, richly diverse collection that connects the dots between the climate crisis and our labour conditions. This collection doesn’t shy away from reflecting the twin realities of dread and sorrow that come with working in a perpetual state of crisis. But it also moves us to process this collective climate grief through strengthening our bonds of solidarity. A powerful read for all of us trying to live, work, and resist during the polycrisis!”
Brigette DePape, Climate Planner at Narratives and author of Sun Compass“This collection sings through smoke, holding grief and humour with tender precision. We’re welcomed as friends to witness the labour of living through climate crisis, where catharsis emerges from honest reflection, our DNA is found in trees, and hope dances peace into being.”
Rita Wong, author of Current, Climate and undercurrent“I am moved and awed by the power of labour in all the ways this anthology honours and holds up. Navigating the bleak depths and the bright sweaty surfaces of daily life, this book gathers an incredible range of workers’ voices, offering much needed lifelines and poetic corroboration that we need one another. Testifying to the dread and persistence, the weariness and the tenderness, of everyday people living with the grievous impacts of centuries of industrial-scale colonial extraction, these poems help readers to nourish the creative solidarity we need from the ground up.”
Ana Guerra Marin, Communities Director, Iron & Earth“As we continue to work through never-ending catastrophes, this book reminds us to pause, look at our colleagues and comrades, and see that we are not alone. It shows us the beauty and the pain of the everyday and leaves us with the feeling that when we are together, we are truly powerful.”
Authors
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