Margaret Atwood’s burning questions: her Anthropocene poems in <i>Dearly</i>

Margaret Atwood has been engaged with social, political, and environmental issues for over sixty years, and her ecological principles are fundamental to her environmental ethics and her creativity. This article explores her ecopoetic acts of resistance to the challenges of the Anthropocene era in her elegiac volume Dearly (2020), with its disaster scenarios and environmental warnings directly addressed to her readers. It includes detailed analyses of five poems in the ‘Plasticene Suite’ which end with urgent questions, foreshadowing her Burning Questions (2022). Atwood appeals to her readers’ emotions and imagination, fusing scientific fact with feeling through the special language of lyric discourse. She aims to shock us into awareness of our global crisis and human responsibility for the planet. However, with her characteristic doubleness, she ends this Anthropocene series with a transformative vision of hope and renewal, reframing Anthropocene anxieties from an ecological perspective where human and natural rhythms are intimately interconnected.