Emergency Dream by Polly Atkin
Seren Books
Published 16th March 2026.
Emergency Dream grows out of entangled emergencies: social, political and personal, from climate crisis to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The poems seek to show the inextricability of Climate Justice and Disability Justice, drawing on close observation of the natural world and the human world from the position of a disabled bodymind within it. There are two presiding modes of Emergency Dream: states of emergency and states of dream. In places the two intersect, as the boundaries of dream and the boundaries of crisis blur and dissolve into each other. Visions of the future and visions of the past collide in waking and sleeping dreams, taking the reader from landscapes threatened by floods and wildfires “ home and abroad “ to impossible dreamscapes and soundscapes. Many of these poems address the isolating effects of being a disabled person during a pandemic, knowing you cannot risk infection when much of the world has decided to accept it as inevitable. The trauma of the pandemic brings old traumas to the surface. The years of the pandemic are reconfigured as though seasons of a TV show to emphasize the absurdity and hyperreality. There are poems of anger, fear, and frustration, and poems which explore dark and difficult subjects: sexual violence, climate collapse, ableism, mortality.
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