Wildfire Verses

Chronicling the devastating effects of the 2023 Kelowna wildfire, these poems capture the personal experience of climate disaster.

Wildfire Verses begins from a deeply personal place: the author’s displacement after evacuation amidst the McDougall Creek Wildfire in the Okanagan in 2023. The poems in the collection explore what it means to feel like a climate refugee while under a state of emergency. The urgent, raw tone commands attention while commemorating and documenting “the trauma of fire and the fire of trauma” that engulfed the city of Kelowna in that year.

The poems also invite sustained engagement with the questions of climate change and the limits of the Anthropocene. They press upon readers the importance of thinking beyond the human in the thick of, and in the aftermath of, climate disasters. The works invites reflections on the ways in which the vulnerabilities of global warming are unequally distributed.

The poems, however, are not hopeless. Just as Adebayo paints the dire effects of climate crisis, his poems also dwell on the place of planetary interdependence for the survival of human and non-human beings in our increasingly burning world. This collection emphasizes the importance of climate activism and eco-collectivism in the face of environmental collapse.

“Wildfire Verses reminds us that the postures of terror and joy share an overwhelming source. What terrible balm, what brilliant anguish to hear Adebayo singing to us through the blaze.”

“Sakiru Adebayo’s Wildfire Verses is both grief work and an earth song—a critique of the Capitalocene that reminds us that we have left our multispecies world in a far worse state than ever before. Yet it is a heartfelt testament to what remains radiant, kinetic and enduring on our planet. Each poem implicates, warns and encourages us to act this very minute. A timely, essential debut.”

“What’s one voice to a wildfire? What’s one voice to the colonial death cult? But hope lives in testament, in witnessing, in giving voice to our culture of devastation, where only its ‘calculus of displacement remains the same.’ These are poems with a great passion for change, as our future becomes an inferno at our doorstep.”

“This work is a necessary reckoning. It is a haunting political manifesto on our shared negligence and the fragile environment that sustains our very existence.”

“Eloquent and contemplative, this collection marks a vital reckoning with how we bear witness to climate change, and how we endure alongside it, one day at a time.”