September 12, 2023 ALL

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What Can Be Done About Climate Change? Join us for a talk and reading by poet and environmentalist E.J. McAdams

Join us for a talk and reading by poet and environmentalist E.J. McAdams,
Thursday, September 28, 2023 at 7pm in Rodman A at John Carroll University.

McAdams has worked as a development officer for the Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society, and BirdLife International, and will read poems and talk about the work of environmental action in the face of climate catastrophe.

About his book, Marcella Durand writes: “What to do with the word “nature” in poetry when we are destroying nature so quickly? How do we speak, much less sing, of so much extinction and human-caused loss? E.J. McAdams’ response is to sing everything, all of it or as much as possible, sounded out, fearless, precise, surprising, shocking, in new poetic forms that better fit the drastic and frightening changes taking place on both macrolevel and microlevel: the last of a species pecking through an eggshell, the peregrine in the freezer with a beak broken from a collision, what people say after wildfire burns their entire Paradise. I recommend reading E.J. McAdams’ LAST out loud, singing/shouting each line in city parks, the subway, the office. Let it echo off the walls “amidst skyscrapers” in an elegy for our ecology/our planet/our lives that is devastating, but joyous still in its love for what was and what might still be possible: “Nature be/ Nature be was/ Nature be is/ Nature be will be.”

E.J. McAdams is a poet, artist, and collaborator exploring language and mark-making in the urban environment using procedures and improvisation with found and natural materials. In addition to his first book LAST (BlazeVOX [books] 2023), he has published five chapbooks and had a solo exhibition, an installation called Trees Are Alphabets, at The Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Sponsored by the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program, the Department of English, Department of Biology, and the Environmental Issues Group.
Free and open to the public.

Questions? Contact Dr. Philip Metres at pmetres@jcu.edu or 216-556-1101.