Anatomy of the Inchoate

How do we make futures in an unmade world? How do we move forward amid the rubble of past violences and the ongoingness of social and ecological injustice? As communities navigate climate crisis, industrial collapse, and global uncertainty--some people building new worlds, others simply getting by--this project asks how pasts and futures are registered not only in minds, but in human and more-than-human bodies. What forms of embodied knowledge take shape in the space of the inchoate?

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During fertility treatment with her partner, Alana Brekelmans found herself overwhelmed by grief and love for the world. Sitting with the paradox of trying to create life in a dying world, and with the ways that paradox was carried in her own body, she returned to a decade of research into how people feel their way through change and grapple with the not-yet.

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Moving between poetry and essay, this collection holds two truths at once: the knowledge of imminent collapse, and the sense that there is no option but to keep working towards a more liveable future. In doing so, it asks how we somatically process catastrophe, what embodied strategies emerge for living with chronic crisis, and how we can feel our way towards the inchoate.