In the early days of the pandemic when things were extremely unsettled, I had one of those weird liminal-state dreams while napping on my couch one evening. The word “ANTIDOTE” intensely vibrated into my awareness. I got the feeling that I needed to start doing things that would be an antidote to the challenges we were experiencing. To me, this meant that I needed to document my progress remembering how to live in an animist, decolonized reality. This vision rekindled my rusty hand for writing poetry.

As always with these kinds of things, it proved to be pretty prescient. In the late spring and early summer of 2020, I read three books that completely changed my relationship with the more-than-human world: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Always Coming Home by Ursula LeGuin, and Climate: A New Story by Charles Eisenstein.

Poems from 2020 - 2022 were all written in service to the concept of ANTIDOTE. If you’re looking for just a few of my favorites, check out my best of tag. My poems in 2023 feel separate from ANTIDOTE, but they don’t feel like a part of a specific collection. Yet.