from the preface of HEAVY: poems that count
I began grieving enormous wildlife population declines of the twentieth century during college in the mid-1990s. However, with attention to macro and microaggressions toward humans and wildlife, Heavy highlights the inherent inadequacy of numbers for measuring loss of life.
While quantity fails intimacy, population data provides critical information about the health status of species, including humans, and their communities. Individuals are not numbers and totals count. In 2017, Gerardo Ceballos and colleagues reported population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is “extremely high” even for species of “low concern” and cited equally “severe” loss reported for terrestrial invertebrates and plants. They described a “biological annihilation” and called for immediate action. Almost a decade on with immediacy increasingly felt, we are indebted to these scientists and all who continue to witness and tally healthy, diseased, and dead individuals. Their work rightly sounds alarm and shapes policy to save and improve all lives, and made possible this witness poetry.
Megan Hollingsworth, MS, is an East-West Psychology PhD student and writer with an interdisciplinary background in community health and environmental studies. Influenced by her Quaker upbringing and Engaged Buddhism, Meg’s creative spiritual practice Extinction Witness expresses and supports grief associated with genocide and anthropogenic species extinction. Her writing has been published in several journals and print anthologies. She is the author of Frog Song, an educational book that leads with a poem inspired by the life of Toughie, who was the last-known living Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog when he died in 2016.
Title: HEAVY: poems that count
Author: Megan Hollingsworth
Illustrations: Bryan Holland and Grace Vejvoda
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - April
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, gloss cover
Pages: 40
Price: $12
ISBN: 978-1-59498-225-5
from the preface of HEAVY: poems that count
I began grieving enormous wildlife population declines of the twentieth century during college in the mid-1990s. However, with attention to macro and microaggressions toward humans and wildlife, Heavy highlights the inherent inadequacy of numbers for measuring loss of life.
While quantity fails intimacy, population data provides critical information about the health status of species, including humans, and their communities. Individuals are not numbers and totals count. In 2017, Gerardo Ceballos and colleagues reported population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is “extremely high” even for species of “low concern” and cited equally “severe” loss reported for terrestrial invertebrates and plants. They described a “biological annihilation” and called for immediate action. Almost a decade on with immediacy increasingly felt, we are indebted to these scientists and all who continue to witness and tally healthy, diseased, and dead individuals. Their work rightly sounds alarm and shapes policy to save and improve all lives, and made possible this witness poetry.
Megan Hollingsworth, MS, is an East-West Psychology PhD student and writer with an interdisciplinary background in community health and environmental studies. Influenced by her Quaker upbringing and Engaged Buddhism, Meg’s creative spiritual practice Extinction Witness expresses and supports grief associated with genocide and anthropogenic species extinction. Her writing has been published in several journals and print anthologies. She is the author of Frog Song, an educational book that leads with a poem inspired by the life of Toughie, who was the last-known living Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog when he died in 2016.
Title: HEAVY: poems that count
Author: Megan Hollingsworth
Illustrations: Bryan Holland and Grace Vejvoda
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - April
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, gloss cover
Pages: 40
Price: $12
ISBN: 978-1-59498-225-5
