Emergency Dream grows out of several entangled emergencies: social, political and personal, from climate crisis to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The poems seek to show the inextricability of Climate Justice and Disability Justice, drawing on close observation of the natural world and the human world from the position of a disabled bodymind within it.
There are two presiding modes of Emergency Dream: states of emergency and states of dream. Visions of the future and visions of the past collide in waking and sleeping dreams, taking the reader from landscapes threatened by floods and wildfires – home and abroad – to impossible dreamscapes and soundscapes. The visionary aspects play with the idea of ‘disabled oracles’ coined by Alice Wong in 2020. The years of the pandemic are reconfigured as though seasons of a TV show to emphasise the absurdity and hyperreality. The poems reutilize and subvert the language of pandemic response, troubling notions of ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘vulnerability’.