Two poets writing ecopoetry as a political ethics of stewardship, care, landwork & co-inhabitation with nonhuman neighbours, from plants to worms to microbes, on and beyond the printed page. Sean Roy Parker will be reading from *stewarding*, and Sam Francis from *Teasels*, both collections published last year. On *Teasels* (Hazel Press, 2025) In the summer of 2023, Sam Francis began keeping a diary about the teasels growing in her garden, closely observing their growth from seedling to maturity and then senescence. The result was a deeply considered and moving testament to the entanglement of plants, people and environment. “I want to learn what it is to be plant. To be alive, and willed, and waning.” *Teasels* is a richly poetic, ecofeminist almanac considering the process of aging and themes of belonging. “I have a hunch that teasels are canny and capable of all kinds of magical things. Things that cannot be known from simply passing them by in the wild. This is why I want you in my garden. To see your wildness, your tiny things. To zoom into your miniscule worlds, to witness your incremental cellular changes as you urge into and out of the world. I shall be your witness. Gathering clues about you like a hybrid, a private detective, scientist, lover.” On *stewarding* (Monitor, 2025) stewarding maps the joyful and embodied ways we can resist the structures that control our food, housing, and socialisation. We begin in an abandoned school, previously the union headquarters for a coal board, which became a legal guardianship, now condemned. We witness acts of communing between human inhabitants, composting worms, microbes in fermentation, and learn working class histories along the way. Here, complex networks emerge and thrive, disrupting the monolithic power of corporate extraction. Sean Roy Parker’s debut collection of poetry is a generous account of hopeful ways to eat and ways to live. “If you want to rebuild your relationship with the planet, this is the place to start. From the wriggling microbiota grown in collectively fermented cabbage, to compost lasagne and art installations for worms, stewarding teems with life. A tender and persuasive testament to a better way of living.” – Abi Palmer Sam Francis Sam is an artist and edgeland naturalist who writes. She has long been fascinated by the colour green. In conversation with non-human life forms, her work explores themes of solitude – often within the landscape – and is shaped by an eco-feminist perspective. Hybrid text is central to her visual practice, emerging through sound, film, installation, print, and reflections on space and place. Sean Roy Parker Parker is a visual artist, writer and landworker who works open-endedly across many disciplines including sculpture, installation, foraging, cooking, publishing, workshops and community gardening. He practises slow, low-tech crafts and food preservation with consumer waste and wild abundance, and shares extensively through labour exchange, favours and artswaps. Against the backdrop of the climate crisis and class division, he challenges the received understanding of what constitutes artistic production through his process-led and (re)generative practice. In the spirit of degrowth much of his work gets eaten, composted or repurposed.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio) — Read more — Read less