Overview

Seedwork (On Breaking Open) by Jesse Hill is structured around the pagan Wheel of the Year, moving through its eight sabbats from Samhain to Mabon as both formal architecture and ecological philosophy. Each section carries a brief prose invocation of its corresponding season before yielding to poems that think through soil, mycelium, decomposition, and queer embodiment as interlocking forms of becoming. Hill's poetics are participatory and process-oriented, drawing on posthuman ecology, interspecies mutualism, and a politics of care that refuses to separate the bodily from the environmental: plastics in the womb sit alongside hunger stones and unbreathable air, while fungi, slime moulds, and maggots are figured as agents of regeneration rather than decay. What emerges is a pamphlet in which ecological grief and queer vitality are not opposites but conditions of the same turning ground.

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9781917617826

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Reviews

This is poetry that builds terrains rather than narratives, a vivid, queer, eco attuned practice that layers language like sediment and invites the reader into a living, relational field that spins out from the wheel of the year. With ritualistic precision and deft weaving of theory and lived experience into sensuous, grounded imagery, Jesse Hill has seeded work here that feels both intellectually bold and deeply embodied. These poems summon rather than describe, offering a porous, polytemporal space where landscape, care, and radical attentiveness meet. - JLM Morton From Samhain to Mabon, the Pagan wheel of the year spins alongside the precarity of our current moment in Seedwork. With a musical ear cupped to the wind, Jesse Hill's first collection operates an ecopoetics of great dignity and gestural tenderness. Asking who we are-seed or sower-these poems read as new whilst channeling back to ancient Druidic and Bardic practice. Seedwork is prayerful, incantatory, restlessly active and underpinned by healing and compassion. Selflessly, the song that is this book also takes the form of a plea for the planet at large. - James Byrne

Author Information

Jesse Hill is a transdisciplinary researcher and poet, creating ecologically-rooted projects shaped by seasonal cycles and our queer relationship with the breathing world. They teach Creative Writing at Edge Hill University whilst working on their posthuman PhD on becoming with the pagan Wheel of the Year. Their writing has been published in Tentacular, Writers Rebel, Anarkiss, Feels, and Seedlings. Their film-poems have been showcased in Mexico, Portugal, New York, and the UK. Connect with them on Instagram @sabbatverse, for the love of mycelium.

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