Hawk on Wire

Hawk on Wire is a record of ecological disaster caused by global heating, and informed prophecy of what will happen unless humanity changes from coal and tar sands oil to renewable energy in the next five years from 2017 to 2022.  The book acknowledges widespread complicity of those in developed nations focusing “only [on] the language of hunger, sex, territory” and imagines “How We Stopped Corporate Psychopaths From Cooking Planet Earth.” These poems reach into the vulnerable area of the human psyche Franz Kafka wrote about: “The dream reveals the reality, which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life – the terror of art.” Starbuck blends history, climate science updates, personal activism, and poetic imagination to paint that “reality” currently affecting island nations, millions of current climate refugees, and vanishing ecological community we share in land, sea, and sky. The book includes a series of imagined ghosts speaking about climate change (Mark Twain, Socrates, Ed Abbey, Mother Teresa, Galileo, Bukowski, T’ao Ch’ien, Rilke, Orwell, and Martha, the last passenger pigeon who died 1914 in Cincinnati Zoo: “The hum of steel rails was the song //foretelling my death and yours, / my captivity and your insincerity instead of / no trains, no tracks, no cages”).