New Book Published: The Next World

 

 The Next World

has been published,

and is available now 

at the links 

below:

Shanti Arts Catalogue Link

Amazon Link

Bookshop.org

 

Cover image by Clark Walding: Distant View, 1992.

Oil and wax over color monotype. 44 x 30 inches. Used with permission of the artist.

 

www.clarkwalding.com / www.charlottejackson.com

 

Book description (from the catalogue):

 

The Next World explores the grief, anger, horror and illumination found on the border between the world as it is now and the one it is evolving into in the wake of climate change catastrophes. These poems wrestle with the difficulty of acknowledging a myriad of endings: species, places, but also the fundamental seasonal and environmental cycles that humans have always known. Simultaneously they explore what regeneration, hope, and “the future” might mean for us now. These poems allow for confusion, for questions, finding the beauty within the terror and revealing the terror inside the beauty.

 

 

 

 

 

I would like to thank Christine Cote, editor and publisher at Shanti Arts, for continuing to publish my work;

 

William Slaughter and Miriam Sagan, for their poetry, energy helping the poetry of others see the light of day, and for taking the time to read the book and write a blurb for the back cover;

 

Clark Walding, for his art, his paintings that continually inspire, and for the awesome cover for this book (along with the cover of my last book: Absence: Presence);

 

and Michaela Kahn, editor/writer, the first to see, hear, and critique the  work. 

 

 

Here's the last poem in the book:

Ancestors

 1.

I woke from a dream of unformed shadows,

rising from the earth, reaching out – and saw

thousands of oak leaves fly by, torn out of  

the sky, into the sky.

 

2.

In the morning, the oak was bare. I found two

oak leaves on the balcony. For one second, I

thought they were ochre hand-prints, blown

onto the concrete.

 

3.

I placed my hands next to the leaves.