Soiled with Earth, Drunk On Air

Plants are the protagonists in Soiled With Earth, Drunk On Air, Sibila Petlevski’s self-translated poetry collection written between 2019 and 2020. It is a libretto for whispering to magical herbs and listening to the voices of silence. In many ways, these poems predicted the fear and isolation of the global pandemic lockdown, while also offering up a strategy to overcome such hardships through understanding people as a part of nature. These are poems for the ecology of the spirit. Smoke You who have just started to walk Upright—you do not need a rope to hang yourself: you need it to hope for a fire as you make the bow drill rubbing two sticks of poplar wood together, searching the distance with your evergreen eyes, certain that the first one you see there will know how to blow the smoke of your confidence into flames.