—Deep time is time / that can not be erased

“With empathy and playfulness, with startle and delight, Jaspreet Singh explores the fragility, beauty, and sorrow of the dreaming and waking worlds… a work of remarkable intellect,” wrote the poet Donna Kane about How to Hold a Pebble. In Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock, Singh deepens his exploration of climate, language, migration, decolonization, and the Anthropocene with an energy both acrobatic and intimate. Interweaving the personal, local, global, and geologic with hidden histories, these poems invite possibilities and defy neat closures, leaving readers with an indelible view of deep time. An ancestor’s words in a diary, a child’s chalk drawing, solar panels that smile like an ancient god, the Great Oxygenation Event: the gaze of these poems is vast, eclectic, and awestruck, while also remaining clear-eyed about the futures that await our planet. Her unironed face / smiling on behalf of the earth… You don’t have such words in your language / You don’t have such words in your language