Leanne Dunic’s collection To Love the Coming End (BookThug) is environmentally-conscious, in an entropic sort of way: “Everything will end,” she says in our interview. “Such is the nature of life.” All the same, Leanne discusses improving our environment to give us the space to fix our other failings.
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This year we feel everyone could see a little more solidarity and community, so we’re getting poetically political with Poets Resist, a series dedicated to poetry as a form of resistance. Every day on the blog we will feature a poet whose work explores one of these topics: colonialism and violence, homophobia and transphobia, environmental destruction, and/or the !@#$% patriarchy.Leanne Dunic’s collection To Love the Coming End (BookThug) is environmentally-conscious, in an entropic sort of way: “Everything will end,” she says in our interview. “Such is the nature of life.” All the same, Leanne discusses improving our environment to give us the space to fix our other failings.
ALU: What are some books that inspired or informed To Love the Coming End?LD: Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami by Gretel Ehrlich, March Was Made of Yarn (various authors), Geographies of a Lover by Sarah de Leeuw. ALU: If you were protesting environmental destruction, what would your protest sign read?LD: There are so many concerns to distill into one sign, and it needs to be punchy, given the format. How about: We’re in this together. Is that protest-y enough? ALU: Why did you write this collection?LD: Environmental crisis is at the forefront of my mind. Of the many problems our world faces, if we can’t correct our treatment of the environment, there will be no place left for us to work on correcting our other problems. Everything will end. Such is the nature of life. Since that’s one thing we truly know, I want to suggest embracing the impending ends of our worlds while doing what we can to sustain people, relationships, environments, etc. ALU: What does poetry as resistance mean to you? LD: Poetry is one of the many ways we can process and express issues that are important to us. I don’t believe it’s an answer, but a step towards understanding and action.* * *
Leanne Dunic is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2015, Leanne won the Alice Munro Short Story Prize (judged by Lisa Moore) and was shortlisted for the Asian-Canadian Emerging Writer Award. Her work has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including Cascadia Review, Lemon Hound, Ricepaper Magazine, and the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. She is the singer/guitarist of the band The Deep Cove and is the Artistic Director of the Powell Street Festival Society in Vancouver.* * *Remember, buying To Love the Coming End or any of our other featured poetry month collections nets you a Poets Resist pack of a patch and buttons to wear to your next protest. And if you need some more resistance poetry inspiration, check out our poetry bot!Keep up with us all month on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook with the hashtag #poetsresist.
