In his second full-length poetry collection, Half-Earth, Blair Trewartha explores what it means to survive in a world beset by climate crisis and the ever-distorting realities of digitized human life. Throughout, the poet weaves dreamlike narratives and excavates scenes of deep history that connect to both family and illness, all the while questioning how to raise young children through a pandemic and the advent of Artificial Intelligence. Rather than sermonizing or catastrophizing, Trewartha presents moments that exist on the brink of both the past and the future, replete with prehistoric tusks frozen in forgotten tundra, a decaying family farmhouse, firestorms, the zeitgeist by algorithm, and a toddler’s visualization of death. Half-Earth is a long-awaited beacon from one of Canada’s finest poets.
