The black maria, Aracelis Girmay’s intricate epic of black survival, enraptures the reader in a gaze that looks simultaneously backward and forward, toward past and future that are impossible to see yet crucial to imagine. We (and the machines we create) remain within our habitable convergence of continent, ocean, and atmosphere. We can infer what occurs there, but humans cannot visit. Below the eight-to-fifty kilometer thick crust, the mantle and core reach thousands of invisible kilometers of depth. Perhaps you already knew this perhaps you also know that if the earth were an apple, the crust would be its peel. The earth is composed of three layers: the core, mantle, and crust. The Imagining the Anthropocene series presents books of poetry that imagine humans’ impact on a geologic scale. If we are to preserve our species by reversing humans’ catastrophic impact on earth systems, we must facilitate a deeper cultural understanding of our relationship with the planet. And yet, resistance to the fact of human-caused climate change remains rampant. Geologists formally adopted the term in 2016. In 2000, atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term “Anthropocene” to describe the geologic epoch during which human activity (primarily, the burning of fossil fuels) has significantly altered the earth.
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