The Pain Tree

Fossil explores the impact of human activity on climate change though a post-colonial lens and from the perspective of all life on earth including plants, creatures, elements and inanimate objects. “The poems in Fossil have been waiting millions of years to be born. Maya Chowdhry’s language erupts out of deep time, vital and vivid. This is powerful work.” Robert Minhinnick

Fossil explores planet earth as she experiences anthropogenic climate change, it examines the impacts of climate chaos and the resultant implications of climate justice for the human species. The collection takes its subject seriously through a playful testing of language.

Voices of plants, trees, fossils, rocks, bodies of water and creatures speak about the human impacts on the climate of our planet. Interspersed with these poems are poems exploring some of the reasons that the earth is being exploited for capital by humans and what this means for all life on earth. Birds, insects and other plants comment on how humans are enslaving them for their gain.

The false selling of constellations, what scientists might be releasing when they core into the ice caps and a war over a glacier are all topics for this collection that interrogates the scientific, transmuting the language through the feathers of an albatross, the sap of a Spider Orchid, a Banksia dentata seed bursting into life.