Grappling With Climate Change Through Poetry

When Associate Professor of Creative Writing Sasha West reads from her new poetry collection, How to Abandon Ship, published in March by Four Way Press, she opens with “Ode to Fossil Fuels”:

“Without you, no paper in reams, no books with spines to break with use, no shirt whose blue I love against my husband’s skin, eyes, no button from another country, no stitches programmed down his sides, no machine measuring my mother’s heart while they cut the cancer out, no tomatoes in winter, no cheap wine, no wandering another country’s streets for a few days, no drug mules, char in a child’s lungs, no miles of highway, no fast enough to break a tumbleweed, no Christmas trees in desert, no rolling blackouts, no moving away from but still keeping family, no clean and running water, no toothbrushes, no antibiotics…”

The poem is a litany encompassing the speaker’s awareness that fossil fuels have made her life more comfortable even as their burning accelerates the earth’s destruction. It’s a conundrum that likely disturbs West’s listeners, too. Even as they urge world leaders to fight climate change, they are unwittingly complicit because so many aspects of their own lives depend on petroleum products. 

For West, poetry is the right medium for exploring the disaster of climate change, the human choices that have created it, and the challenge of bringing new life into a world that sometimes seems doomed. “We need spaces where we're translating the scientific data into human meaning,” she says. “We’re creatures that do best in story. We take things in really deeply when they're connected to emotion.”

West began the project that became How to Abandon Ship more than a decade ago. For years she had been reading the reports issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By 2013, she had noticed that the panel’s predictions about climate change worsened with each new report. That same year, she became a parent and began to grapple with how to prepare her child for a future that felt increasingly bleak. Joining the faculty at St. Edward’s in 2015 catalyzed the work, too. “The liberal arts, cross-discipline experience St. Edward’s wants to create for students has felt so fruitful as a teacher,” she says. West taught courses such as “Ecological Dystopias and Utopias” that helped her understand how her students’ generation was thinking about climate change.

Although How to Abandon Ship reflects West’s fears about new parenthood amid climate change, it is not an autobiographical poetry collection. Rather, its poems are written from the perspectives of multiple speakers, each of whom channels some aspect of West’s research or emotional experience. The primary speaker is a new parent who struggles to resolve her dawning awareness of impending ecological disaster with her protective love for, and wonder at, her child. She revels in small moments of delight with her husband or daughter, while simultaneously fearing that she has brought that daughter into the first stages of an apocalypse.

Poetry can contain such apparent contradictions more easily than longer narrative forms, such as fiction and film, West says. In poetry, contradictions in character, emotion and identity can be right next to one another in the same poem. “There’s something helpful about that,” West says, “because I have a lot of grief, and I have a lot of hope. I have a lot of guilt; I have a lot of wanting to lay guilt down. Poetry allows us to feel opposite things at the same time… It can contain the largeness and the unknown-ness of life.”

Several poems in How to Abandon Ship are written from the perspective of Cassandra, the unheeded prophet of Greek mythology. Instead of predicting the fall of Troy, West’s Cassandra has unsettling visions of environmental degradation, wildfires and bleached coral. In other poems, Cassandra’s daughter, husband and granddaughter speak back to her. Having multiple speakers and perspectives allowed West to build a collection that encompasses the psychological arc of a person encountering the reality of climate change for the first time and realizing she is both victim and perpetrator – a viewpoint encapsulated in “Ode to Fossil Fuels.”

West’s audiences at readings are far more aware of climate change than they would have been in 2013, when she began exploring the themes of How to Abandon Ship. Back then, she worried that readers might not understand the connection between fossil fuels and intensifying storms or wildfires. In 2024, West does not have to explain the science at the heart of her poems. Her listeners generally share the primary speaker’s trepidation and her knowledge that humanity cannot reverse its past mistakes, only make different choices going forward.

The title of the collection sums up that concept, West says. Confronting the reality of ecological disaster “feels like the idea of abandoning ship – ‘I want to get off,’” she says. “But, of course, I can’t get off, because that’s the thing: we are the ship. So I have to rebuild it.”