When Mine Canaries Stop Singing by Nancy Avery Dafoe

Nancy Dafoe’s When Mine Canaries Stop Singing is an important book dealing with the existential crisis of our age. In poetry form, we hear and feel the stark reality of our planet’s distress. A necessary question remains in our hearts after reading: what steps will we take to ensure that our blue sphere survives and thrives?

–Bobbie Dumas Panek, author of Just Another Day 

I was assembling an anthology of poetry and essays about ecology, and Nancy Dafoe happened to be working on ecology poems simultaneously. I don’t know if my anthology encouraged her to write more ecology poems; however, I can see her aspects about ecological concerns even stretches to the stars. We have such a fragile planet made worse by our own wars, pollution, and driving animals into extinction. Dafoe points these facts out lyrically, beginning with her preface, through beavers, leafy sea dragons, people stranded on rooftops during a hurricane, concern for the trees, our carbon footprint, rivers going biologically dead. Don’t say that Nancy Avery Dafoe did not warn you.

–Martin Willitts, Jr, author of ecological poetry, Not Only the Extraordinary are Exiting the Dream World (Flowstone Press, 2022).