Horizons of Care

Review of Craig Santos Perez’s Habitat Threshold (USA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2020)
By Jack Xi

The contents page of Habitat Threshold is prefaced by a graph. Labelled “Global Carbon Emissions from Fossil Fuels (Exhale),” the graph shows the skyrocketing carbon-dioxide levels between 1900-2010. We exist in the decade after the graph’s peak—what are we doing about this crisis? What have we done? This urgency fills the pages of Habitat Threshold, which tackles matters from rising sea levels to police brutality. The latest poetic offering of Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru (Chamorro) writer from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam) who has published several other collections, Habitat Threshold alternates between polemic and sardonic humor in expressing the ethical concerns surrounding climate change. Refusing to frame environmental degradation as a purely ecological issue, Perez’s work declares that racial and class inequalities are key to the problem. It inverts the concept behind its title. Instead of setting limits for communities of endangered animals that make the task of “managing” them easier, readers are encouraged to see ecological harm in a holistic manner that ranges beyond the current patchwork of protected zones.

The collection is loosely arranged into three sections, with a number of thematic threads stretching across all sections. The first section is organized as a chronological journey from Halloween to the New Year, each poem highlighting a name for the current geological era. The second section consists of haiku reformatted into concrete poems, each a meditation on an interstitial moment. The last section features Perez’s “recycled” pastiches for pointed levity. The recurring themes provide clear footholds for readers, lending consistency to the collection’s tone and pace. Each section is also preceded by adulterated graphs, like the one described earlier, highlighting key concerns of the book such as the extinction of flora and fauna, and global temperature averages.

Perez opens Habitat Threshold with the poem “Age of Plastic.” Writing about his wife’s pregnancy and his daughter’s early life, Perez finds plastic everywhere a part of their lives.

Ultrasound waves pulse between plastic,
issue, fluid, and bone until the embryo
echoes. Plastic makes this possible. My wife
labors at home in an inflatable plastic tub.
Plastic disrupts hormonal and endocrine systems.

The word “plastic,” fully black amid paler words, appears more solid and permanent than anything else—its presence smothering human and nonhuman activity. The poem culminates in Perez dreaming that his child should have been made of plastic if she is to survive humanity’s “wasteful hands.” This chilling image of a plastic daughter is an example of one of Perez’s tactics in Habitat Threshold: the foregrounding of children to engender empathy across the borders of class, nation, and species. In the poem “Teething Borders,” Perez speaks against the ill-treatment of refugees by Western countries by juxtaposing the vulnerabilities of refugee children against his daughter’s relative safety. In the poem “Chanting the Waters,” Perez uses children as the face of the global “millions” who are deprived of clean water to express solidarity with Native Americans and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. “[By] the end of this poem,” Perez asserts, “five children will die from water-borne diseases.” Confronted by these images of suffering children, readers are encouraged to re-evaluate our lives against those of the disadvantaged and marginalised.

Perez’s empathetic gaze stretches across the human/non-human divide: in “Echolocation,” Perez addresses the killer whale J35 Tahlequah, who famously swam for days with her dead calf balanced on her snout. Mourning with Tahlequah, Perez describes grief as “our shared/ echolocation,” a means of navigating a sorrowful path through the world. Perez sympathizes deeply with the suffering of even non-human creatures, a sympathy that drives him, as he puts it in the poem “Care,” to find ways to “carry// each other/ towards the horizon// of care.”

What causes the suffering of these ‘others’? Perez’s answer is structural oppression and colonization. A major thematic thread in this collection is found in Perez’s sequence of ‘-cene’ poems, which I will refer to as the Anthropocene sequence. “The Anthropocene” is a term for the current geological age, which is defined as one in which human activity and desires play an outsize role in shaping Earth’s changing environment. While “The Anthropocene” is a popular label for this era, academics have suggested alternative ‘-cenes’ to critically appraise the causes of our current ecological plight. There is “the Capitalocene,” which, as its name suggests, highlights the workings and consequences of capitalism; “the Plantationocene,” which examines plantation agriculture, extractivism, and exploitative labor; and even “the Chthulucene,” which—born of the scientific name for spiders and the Ancient Greek word for earth—decries the binary of “human” and “nature,” arguing instead for symbiotic connections. Perez’s collection features poems for each of these ‘-cenes’: “Halloween in the Anthropocene,” “Thanksgiving in the Plantationocene,” “Christmas in the Capitalocene,” and “New Year’s Eve and Day in the Chthulucene.”

The poem “Halloween in the Anthropocene” gives us the means to understand this poetic sequence. The trick-or-treating children of America, dressed as “Disney princess[es]” and “ninjas,” are contrasted against the “black boys, enslaved [...] who haul bags of cacao under west African heat” and the “brown girls who sew our clothes [... in] sweatshops.” The dissonance between the living conditions of American children and those in the Global South highlights how economic development incurs hidden costs. Perez sarcastically “praises” these suffering children of the Global South, his sarcasm making it clear that these children do not have the choice to lay their lives down this way for American trick-or-treaters, but they are forced into it by circumstances of economic privation. The festive celebrations in the Anthropocene sequence, with their joyful, consumerist excess, cloaks the colonial origins of the Global North and the corresponding “slow violence” in the South. Each poem in the Anthropocene series thus subverts the cheer of the festivities, asking who are celebrating and what, really, is being celebrated.

Colonial violence against Native Americans haunts Perez’s poems. In “New Year’s Eve and Day in the Chthulucene,” Perez admits to feeling powerless in the face of the indifference and ignorance of wider society, exemplified by an incident where a stadium of people ignored two activists protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline and continued watching the football game instead. Dissatisfied but unable to do anything substantial about it, Perez’s speaker watches the game on television till he falls asleep, and enters a dream haunted by capitalist oppression. Taking a taxi “at the crossroads of technophilia, precarity, and the sharing economy,” Perez is brought to a native reserve named “Utopia.” There is nothing utopian, however, about the reserve, with its poisoned waters. It is here that Perez encounters an one-eyed salmon who says:

“Your apocalypse began centuries ago. And it’s accelerating.”

This exchange is revealing, in that it confirms for the speaker that the current devastation of the environment is inextriably linked to the history of American colonization and resource extraction. The descriptions of the nightmarish land—where “empty skyscrapers of the neoliberal megacity,” “private prisons,” and ruined native reserves sit side by side—make visible how climate change affects the vulnerable first.

Since the worship of capitalism has not only failed to avert climate change, but instead exacerbated it, Habitat Threshold calls for readers to look beyond the pleasures of consumerism. The poem “Praise Song for Oceania” rolls across several pages like waves, its italicized language anaphoric and cinematic. Besides praising the personified ocean for its beauty, its “fluid currents and trenchant darkness,” Perez also celebrates it for its powers for vengeance—its capacity to “starve us like [its] corals starved and bleached.” Ultimately he praises the ocean’s “capacity for hope”: 

praise your rainbow warrior and peace boat
                  praise your hokuleʻa and sea shepherd
                                        praise your arctic sunrise and freedom flotillas

Perez expresses gratitude for every conservation effort, for native ways of being with nature, and for the power of the ocean to connect us across borders as “our common heritage,” a “trans-oceanic/ past present future flowing/ through our blood.” National borders are eschewed in favor of togetherness through “one world ocean.”

Habitat Threshold is both stylistically innovative and visually stunning. The epigraphs are arranged in unorthodox ways (upside down, on precarious diagonals, or even beside the poem in another column), as are some of his poems—his haiku fall across the page in diagonals or splay like sunbathers. These stylistic flourishes keep the book engaging with their aesthetic unexpectedness. Of course, the book is not all style and no substance: each flourish lends meaning to the work. For instance, there is Perez’s “recycled” series, pastiches of popular poems (and one song). Perez rewrites ubiquitous source material into texts concerned with ecological and political issues; the label “recycling” calls the values of sustainability and conservation into focus. One of his “recycled” poems is “One fish, Two fish, Plastics, Dead fish,” a cutting parody of the Dr. Seuss poem “One fish two fish red fish blue fish”: 

Overfishing, Purse seine, Ghost fishing, Bycatch

This one has a little radiation.
This one has a little mercury.
O me! O my! What schools
of bloated fish float by!

Perez’s choice to “recycle” Dr. Seuss stresses how mass extinction and other hot-button topics pervade innocent interactions with his child. An innocent vision from a children’s book is transformed into a marine dystopia. Cannily, Perez maintains Dr. Seuss’ cheerful tone with pat rhymes, enthusiastic exclamations, and constant minimization of harm (“… a little… a little…”) while describing horrific ecological destruction. This dissonance between the poem’s tone and subject matter highlights the absurdity of raising a child in a world bent on destruction. Similarly, his other “recycled” poems play off the original tone and words of their source materials to enliven, in a macabre fashion, the collection’s themes.

As much as there is to enjoy in Habitat Threshold, there are moments when Perez’s voice comes across as slightly didactic. For instance, this segment of “Teething Borders” feels essay-like, which can turn off certain readers: 

[...] More than half
of all border walls around the world
have been built since 2001—“justified”
by wars on terror. But refugees are
not the true terror. The true terror is
that 34,000 people are forced from
their homes every day [...]

In other instances, Perez briefly slips into the pitfall of telling rather than showing. I found the inclusion of the phrase “vulnerable humans” in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier” unnecessary: the vulnerability is already implied in the poem’s apocalyptic vision of melting glaciers. I was also uncomfortable with Perez’s language in the poem “Postcards from Taiwan,” where he describes a customs official "grabbing [Perez’s] passport the way Trump grabs pussy." The comparison conflates two horrific threats in a way that trivializes both.

Nonetheless, Habitat Threshold is a fantastic jumping-off point for reading literature on climate justice, and Perez’s poems are full of galvanizing ideas I want to follow up on. I continue to return to the epigraph that opens the collection, a quote by Donna Haraway:

Staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.

Ultimately Perez’s vibrant stylistic innovations, keen attention to naming, extensive use of epigraphs, and urgent calls to action impress on this reader that this epoch is indeed ‘unfinished’; that efforts are being made, that we must uplift native thought, that we must act. That this can yet be a creation story.


Jack Xi (he/they) is a queer Singaporean poet. A member of the writing collective /Stop@BadEndRhymes (stylized /s@ber), they can be found on wordpress under “jackxisg.wordpress.com”. Jack has been published in OF ZOOS, Wyvern Lit, Perverse, and several Singaporean anthologies.