Seasonal Disturbances: Environment, Migration, Science, and an Anthropocene Poetics of Relation in Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Work

This chapter examines Karen McCarthy Woolf’s climate change poetry in Seasonal Disturbances (2017). The chapter analyses drafts of her poems and draws on an interview with her that was conducted for this monograph. It builds on Donna Haraway’s work on gender and multispecies kinship in the Anthropocene, Kathryn Yusoff’s work on ‘Black Anthropocenes,’ and scholars of Edouard Glissant who have further ecologised his concept of the poetics of relation. It considers how her work offers fresh ways of subverting white-dominated and male-dominated arguments about the origins of the Anthropocene. I argue that McCarthy Woolf’s poetic responses to white male biologists subvert and parody patriarchal, Eurocentric science, and I analyse how McCarthy Woolf’s formal innovations convey London’s cosmopolitan environments, its links to global systems of capitalist and racist oppression, and its vulnerability to climate change. McCarthy Woolf’s focus on river-systems and oceanic systems is analysed as an ecologically aware response to paradigms of the Black Diaspora. The chapter ends by drawing attention to her collaboration with scientists monitoring ocean plastics, her work with climate change arts organisation Cape Farewell, and a recent commission for Magma poetry’s Anthropocene Issue.