“Poems in I’ll Get Right On It arise from inside a wide slice of the workforce: a massage therapist, postie, teacher, sandblaster, even an invasive vegetation management technician. A call centre employee muses how people waiting endlessly on hold to have a problem solved are like how we’re all waiting for “the fix” for climate change. A fisherman pens a new folk tune lamenting how a proposed mine’s tailings will impact the salmon on which his livelihood depends. Presenting a more accurate picture of where we are as a society than either greenwashing corporate-speak or the environmental end-time doomsters, the voices of those whose jobs each day actually rebuild the world as it changes are well worth a listen.”
— Tom Wayman, author of If You’re Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free: Literature and Social Change

“An essential contribution to climate change literature, this book advances climate justice with voices not typically brought to the table. The urgency articulated in these itinerant voices is impossible to unhear, and, I hope, impossible to ignore.”
— Madhur Anand, Governor General’s Literary Award-winning writer and Director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability Laboratory, University of Guelph

“A moving, richly diverse collection that connects the dots between the climate crisis and our labour conditions. This collection doesn’t shy away from reflecting the twin realities of dread and sorrow that come with working in a perpetual state of crisis. But it also moves us to process this collective climate grief through strengthening our bonds of solidarity. A powerful read for all of us trying to live, work, and resist during the polycrisis!”
— Jill MacIntyre, 350 Canada national organizer

“This collection sings through smoke, holding grief and humour with tender precision. We’re welcomed as friends to witness the labour of living through climate crisis, where catharsis emerges from honest reflection, our DNA is found in trees, and hope dances peace into being.”
— Brigette DePape, Climate Planner at Narratives and author of Sun Compass

“I am moved and awed by the power of labour in all the ways this anthology honours and holds up. Navigating the bleak depths and the bright sweaty surfaces of daily life, this book gathers an incredible range of workers’ voices, offering much needed lifelines and poetic corroboration that we need one another. Testifying to the dread and persistence, the weariness and the tenderness, of everyday people living with the grievous impacts of centuries of industrial-scale colonial extraction, these poems help readers to nourish the creative solidarity we need from the ground up.”
— Rita Wong, author of Current, Climate and undercurrent

“As we continue to work through never-ending catastrophes, this book reminds us to pause, look at our colleagues and comrades, and see that we are not alone. It shows us the beauty and the pain of the everyday and leaves us with the feeling that when we are together, we are truly powerful.”
— Ana Guerra Marin, Communities Director, Iron & Earth

The Land and Labour Poetry Collective is a collaborative editorial group based in the prairie and western provinces of the lands now known as Canada. The collective includes award-winning poets and nonfiction writers who work or have worked in farming, geology, project management, oil and gas, research, teaching, editing, and manual labour. Its members are Moni Brar, Jenna Butler, Samantha F. Jones, Jamie Paris, Kelly Shepherd, and Melanie Dennis Unrau.
Anjali Appadurai is a climate activist and campaigner, her work ranging from community organizing to high-level national campaigning to electoral politics. She is the director of Campaigns with the Climate Emergency Unit and the Padma Centre for Climate Justice.