This chapter argues that ‘address’, one of poetry’s most fundamental — if sometimes overlooked – dimensions, offers insights into the concepts, affects, and scales surrounding our planet’s intertwined economic and ecological systems. Analysing work by Jorie Graham, Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Stephen Collis and Adam Dickinson, it explores poems that address a variety of subjects and entities. These include poems addressed to future generations, to geographical places, to online communities, to the human species, to the planet, and from the non-human to the human. In doing so, I show how understandings of globalization and the Anthropocene have caused a recalibration in the form as well as subject-matter of environmentally engaged poetry. This has implications for how we negotiate questions of climate change, temporality, extinction, technology, activism and agency. Now, more than ever, it matters not only what poems speak about, or even who (or what) is speaking, but to whom (or to what) they speak

Fossil fuels represent one of the primary drivers of the Anthropocene’s geological and ecological transformations while their production is bound up in different social, political and economic systems. This chapter traces some of the most striking features of recent literature engaging withfossil fuels, covering examples from theatre (Ella Hickson’s 2016 transhistorical play Oil), fiction (Jennifer Haigh’s 2016 fracking novel Heat and Light) and poetry (Juliana Spahr’s 2015 long poem on Deepwater Horizon, ‘Dynamic Positioning’). Moving through considerations of resource conflict, hydrocarbon extraction, environmental justice and industrial disaster, as well as the way the petrochemical industry permeates every facet of contemporary life, the chapter argues that emergent ‘petroliterature’ is at its most interesting when it tries to find a formal response – whether through stagecraft or metaphor or metre – to negotiate the duality of fossil fuels as both volatile substances and abstract commodities.

What brings speculative realism and posthumanism together is a mutual understanding that, while the non-human world might be unexpected or unknowable, it is nevertheless real. Strategies for confronting this reality are the focus of this chapter. Although there are different strands of speculative realism, all are based on the argument that while there is a divide between human and non-human worlds, this divide can be crossed, either directly or indirectly. Thus although we can never really know the other because it is outside of human experience, this does not mean there is an unbreachable gap, because art is created by the tension between humanity and the world-beyond-humanity, exceeding even the concepts of art’s creators. Work by Kazuo Ishiguro, Solmaz Sharif, Christian Bök, Denis Villeneuve, and Juliana Spahr is used to develop this thesis.