The phrase “the art of living on a damage planet,” originating from a book of the same name edited by notable scholars Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Anne Swanson, articulates the stakes of living in the Anthropocene and our changing relationship with the world, particularly through multispecies kinships. A similar commitment can be found in the anthology I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis, although here “the art” takes on a literal form. As Anjali Appadurai writes in the foreword to the collection, “Poetry brings us back to the framework of our bodies, the only real place we can build anything from.” Poetry becomes a way of coping with existential dread and making sense of the doom and sluggishness stemming from the imposition of corporate life. The latter is highlighted by Alison Holliday in “Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years”: “I can make myself the perfect little labourer for an interview / the one whose biggest dream is to answer the phone / and make money.”

The definition of labour in the collection is as wide ranging as the backgrounds of the individuals who contributed to the collection. The work of familiar poets is nestled alongside those who are new and emerging writers, working poets who laboured in factories and did roofing, were postal workers and servers in restaurants. As the title suggests, the present Anthropocene is inseparable from the working conditions described in the poems, with breathing and fires, oil and species threat, as well as cynicism and an acknowledgement of general hopelessness, all recurring themes in the collection. The environmental and physical balance with land rights and paths towards decolonization, and workers’ rights. Emotional labour is also present, the sort that is demanded under capitalism but also its counterpart, the care that is required—and often denied—to the environment, as felt in Renée E. Mazinegiizhigo-kwe Bédard’s declaration in “Wiinina amowin, Air Pollution”: “who cares about the air? / who takes care of the air? / i do! i do! i care! / i burn sage to decolonize it / to feed the spirit of the air.”

As is often the case with an edited collection, additional groupings and patterns emerge across the collection, forming their own, more specialized focus. Several poems take a microcosmic approach, exploring the intersection of labour and the effects of climate change. In “Enduring Symbols of Disposibility,” Kristian Enright uses the movie theater as an entry point for commenting on single-use plastic, while Catherine Parceaud’s “Sweltering College Classrooms” highlights how heat has a direct impact on mood and student performance. Another grouping of poems focuses on food, as in Hanako Teranishi’s declaration that “It becomes a luxury to eat a dying population” as they discuss food waste in “A Prayer for Fish,” and in Ed Edmo’s “There Has Been Something” and its description of missing “the smell of salmon / cooking,” a mundane, olfactory experience that is marked by scarcity as our relations to food change due to climate change. Poems like Zahra Tootonsab’s “Voice” and Paul Akpomuje’s “Distorted Portrait,” on the other hand, remind the reader that race is integral to discussions of the environment, invoking the discourse of scholars like Janae Davis who argue that an environmental history that does not recognize the ongoing legacy of colonial violence is merely another form of injustice.

With its wide scope, I’ll Get Right On It has much to offer for those looking for an intersectional approach to environmental and labour poetry, whether that concerns the present and the future of the individual, collective, or the larger communal networks that the poets within urge us to locate and form.