Carbonfish Blues is about the war planetary life is losing to oil companies, and an appeal to all to help reverse this before Mother evicts us. Bill McKibben praised Starbuck's first ecopoetry book Industrial Oz as"rousing, needling, haunting." In Carbonfish Blues, Starbuck teams with Guy Denning whose drawings, murals, and paintings of activism, refugees, human vulnerability, and realism are known throughout Europe. This book reports local and global scenes of climate breakdown most affecting the silenced least responsible. Thomas Jefferson's warning about injustice of slavery resonates in the book's words and images: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Join Starbuck's friends with"organic carrot cupcakes / and Dry-Erase pens" fighting big oil and imagining "The night before the stone in his forehead, Goliath had a terrible dream."
Review in Amsterdam Quarterly
About the Author
Scott T. Starbuck ’s Hawk on Wire: Ecopoems (Fomite, 2017) was selected from over 1,500 entries as a Montaigne Medal Finalist at Eric Hoffer Awards for “the most thought-provoking books.” Written at a PLAYA climate change residency, it was a July 2017 “Editor’s Pick” at Newpages.com along with The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, and featured at Yale Climate Connections. There is a 24-minute YouTube of his book launch sponsored by La Jolla Historical Society’s WEATHER ON STEROIDS EXHIBIT. In addition to being a poet, Starbuck participated in, and presented at, the UCSD Climate Curriculum Workshop, gathering ideas for his science-based poems. His climate ecoblog is Trees, Fish, and Dreams with over 42,000 pageviews from all over the globe, and his “ Manifesto from Poet on a Dying Planet ” is online at Split Rock Review. He was a core speaker at the 17th annual California Higher Education Sustainability Conference (CHESC), hosted in 2018 by University of California, Santa Barbara.
About the Artist
Guy Denning is a contemporary artist, born in the UK and now living and working in France. More work can be seen at his website.
Fifth Wall Presents: Guy Denning
Praise
“Kairos, sudden insight, gifts Scott T. Starbuck's poems with lightning-quick vision.”
—Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature and A Fish to Feed All Hunger
“Carbonfish Blues explores today's urgent environmental issues with soulfulness, humor, irony, and wisdom. Throughout, Scott Starbuck speaks in a profound human voice imploring us to listen closely to the Earth for guidance, to act conscientiously of our connection to all things, and to sing our common heritage of light.”
—Craig Santos Perez
