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.