SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, eds. Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland

 

The poets inthis book explore the complex relationship between environmental collapse andmental health, inviting readers to consider the unprecedented personal impactsof the crisis. The looming thread of environmental collapse has brought with ita sense of impending annihilation and intensified a mental health crisis thatwas made crueller by a global pandemic that revealed our fragile nature. As writers,we use our words to navigate this turmoil, alleviate our own suffering, and inspireothers. Through speaking and writing, we reclaim power, not only over our ownnarratives but in how we shape our collective futures. As we continue tograpple with the overwhelming realities of ecological destruction, these poemsinvite us to listen, to feel, and to respond. In this moment of profound loss,we are reminded that the voice can be a force for change, a means of healing. Thoughthe weight of environmental collapse may sometimes silence us, we are called tospeak. Even as speech may dry on the tongue, it gives us a thirst for change. (“Editor’sPreface”)

I’mintrigued by this new collection, SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health , edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), a poetrytitle that provides a complexity of literary response to “the relationshipbetween environmental collapse and mental health,” and the precarity throughwhich we currently live. “whereupon I join Lear and his Fool / on the blastedheath,” writes London, Ontario-based writer and speaker Jennifer Wenn, in thepoem “Fire and Flood,” “and while the erstwhile king howls / at the gale and delugeI cower, / uselessly, / looking for a sign, [.]” There are multiple piecesechoing Wenn’s particular sentiment, seeking a sign or marker of hope throughthe gloom, with other pieces that rage their appropriate rage through the storm,or even a spiraling into a dark swirl of hopelessness. As Toronto-based poet,editor and translator Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi begins the poem “Movement XVI”:“that dark resignation to loss. how long to run after joy and just / find constructioncones scattered. I take out the trash and who / knows maybe I’m resistant topesticide. some relief comes in / the form of needles. I’m defeated by numbers.It simply won’t / happen.”” Sometimes the only way to respond to a crisis is towrite through it, providing a clarity of thought and potential action, and thiscollection, put together as the result of a public call, provides an assemblageof first-person lyric narratives by some two dozen Canadian poets that shake tothe roots of mental health and climate concern, providing both observational comfortand clarity to their sharpness. The collection includes contributions byBrandon Wint, Jennifer Wenn, Conal Smiley, Concetta Principe, Dominik Parisien,Khashayar “Kess” Mohammmadi, Kathryn Mockler, Tara McGowan-Ross, D.A. Lockhart,Grace Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Aaron Kreuter, gregor Y kennedy, Maryam Gowralli,Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Sydney Hegele, Karen Houle, Nina Jane Drystek, AJDolman, Conyer Clayton and Gary Barwin. There’s a precarity to these lyrics,these lines, one that writes directly into crisis,

Theseare poems that want and crave hope, but can’t always get there, perpetually searchingthrough the fog for a clarity. How might we get there? “My best friend tells /me all life on earth shares a single common / ancestor, with a name.” writes urban Mi’kmaq writer and multi-disciplinary artist Tara McGowan-Ross as part of thepoem “if I had a son I would call him Ben,” “My therapist explains that / my obligationschange as something gets closer.”