Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781727959
Publication date: March 16, 2026
Price: £10.99
“[in these poems] survival is not abstraction but practice itself: animal, embodied, ongoing.” – Max Wallis
Emergency Dream grows out of the entangled emergencies of our times: social, political and personal. The poems explore the inextricability of Climate Justice and Disability Justice, drawing on close observation of the natural world and the human world from the position of a disabled bodymind within it.
Throughout, states of emergency and states of dream overlap. Visions of the future and past collide in waking and sleeping dreams, travelling landscapes threatened by floods and wildfires to impossible dreamscapes and soundscapes. The years of the pandemic are reconfigured as though seasons of a TV show, reutilising and subverting the language of pandemic response, troubling notions of ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘vulnerability’ versus the ignored expertise of Disabled Oracles, to use Alice Wong’s phrase. Disabled joy and disabled rage are both tools for survival learnt from human and non-human communities, in which all lives have equal value, and water and stone have as much agency as people or frogs do.
Polly Atkin
Polly Atkin (FRSL) is a poet and non-fiction writer whose work focuses on nature, place and disability. Her poetry collections are Basic Nest Architecture (Seren Books, 2017), Much With Body (Seren Books, 2021) and Emergency Dream (Seren Books, 2026). Her non-fiction books include Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), Some Of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre, 2023) – Lakeland Book of the Year 2024 and longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2024 – and The Company of Owls (Elliott and Thompson, 2024). Her poetry and prose appears in various anthologies and academic editions.
She grew up in Nottingham then lived in East London for seven years before moving north to Cumbria. She has a phd from Lancaster University and has taught English and Creative Writing at QMUL, Lancaster University, and the Universities of Strathclyde and Cumbria. She now works as a freelancer from her home in the English Lake District, where she co-owns historic Grasmere bookshop Sam Read Bookseller.
Photo credit: Alex Muir Photography
Pat Edwards, London Grip
“Emergency Dream is a generous, moving and vital collection about what it means to live with disability during a time of climate emergency. The speaker of Atkin’s poems utter vivid truths: “We lie down, we get up. Something is lost / or gained. Or both. We are dying quicker / or slower than we think. This is my secret.” Despite the persistent pain of survival, beauty remains in the “glowing / half-globe” of a sessile oak, or “sun like a chink in the wall of winter”, and a clear music rings through these precious poems suffused with light and loss.”
Mary Jean Chan, author of ‘Bright Fear’
“Polly Atkin’s Emergency Dream is incandescent: furious and bright. This is beauty experienced with hunger and urgency; this is a manifesto for finding a way; this is necessary reading. Polly has forged a fearless new vocabulary for pain; walking into the storm and not expecting any answers or mercy from it, just the fact of forest and antler, river and fox. She has stepped beyond her self into our shared darkness, our shared light, and with passion and exquisite skill, she has brought back these words.”
Clare Shaw, author of ‘Towards a General Theory of Love’
“Parted into six seasons, Emergency Dream by Polly Atkin is a work of remarkable multiplicity. With tenderness and heart, these poems observe how ‘it’s harder / each year to tell if the world is still working.’ Though unflinching in its powerful call for climate and disability justice, Atkin’s approach is an activating and hopeful one, where ‘solidarity’ rises ‘like mist from the water.’ This collection moves with a gorgeous clarity of language, weaving together stunning reflections of the natural world, of its ‘maximalist’ woods, with the ‘dreams of the many.’ Personal, political, and piercing, Emergency Dream is a lyrical homage to the world- and word-builders who came before, and an invitation to those who will come next.”
Alycia Pirmohamed, author of “Another Way to Split Water’
“Three collections in, and with a voice already as distinct as the imagery and themes she explores in her work, Polly Atkin’s Emergency Dream takes a long look at the tenuous state of the world and times we find ourselves within. Atkin’s work has always examined the intersection between the natural and the human with a startling level of clarity and depth, but the poems in this book about disability and fatigue are as tender and moving as you’ll find anywhere; I can’t think of anyone exploring the intersection of chronic illness and nature quite so well, so widely, and quite so enjoyably for the reader.”
Daniel Sluman, author of ‘Single Window’
Bethany Handley, author of ‘Cling Film’
“Emergency Dream is a work of contrasting atmospheres, at once full of lyrical flight and down-to-earth, dystopian and homely. In these poems, a sense of personal and ecological crisis, where the destruction is somehow headlong and creeping, sits alongside an altogether slower timescale of loving immersion in the natural world and its seasons. The book’s linguistic and imagistic invention are often forged in extremis, not least in an extraordinary series of poems that considers what it means to try to point to pain, to make it felt for another with the imperfect tool of language. As a work of ecological reckoning, disability advocacy and haunting observation of a life’s inner weather, Emergency Dream is a wonderful, necessary thing.”
Sarah Howe, author of ‘Foretokens’
