Poetry Expo 26
/ 23 February 2026
The Anthroposheen – the beauty in the burning out
Poetry Expo 2026
The Anthroposheen – the beauty in the burning out brings together a series of poems that engage directly with ecological collapse, media saturation, and the moral distortions produced by late-capitalist systems. The texts examine humanity’s impact on the planet while questioning the narratives through which this impact is justified, aestheticised, or obscured.
In The Anthroposheen and The Apparatus, the poems interrogate the intertwined forces of money, media, and power, exposing how they generate a dystopian emotional and political landscape – a reality increasingly mediated, fragmented, and estranged. Some Notes on Animalia shifts the focus toward the non-human world, celebrating the distinctive qualities of animal life and gesturing toward the possibility of symbiotic futures grounded in coexistence rather than domination. In Pagoda, attention turns to the monuments contemporary society constructs, reflecting on the near-religious elevation of financial wealth and the forms of legacy such values leave behind.
The project incorporates text alongside AI-generated video imagery, used here not as illustration but as critical medium. The deliberately retained glitches and emotional flatness of the visuals function as commentary on the limitations of artificial systems to convey meaning, depth, and ethical complexity. In this tension between poetic language and technological mediation, the work asks how – after catastrophe, amid extinction, and within disrupted realities – poetry can continue to witness, resist, and imagine otherwise.
The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Symbiotic Futures – Ecopoetics in the Age of Extinction, Disrupted Realities – Poetry and the Politics of Truth.
Author
Gary Smillie
Gary Smillie is a Liverpudlian poet and short story writer, living in Frankfurt, Germany, who received a Masters in Creative Writing from JMU in Liverpool in 2005. Nigh on twenty years later, he wrote and published a collection of short stories, Goodnight Drinks, which is available to buy from many reputable, and not so reputable outlets. In the interim, his poems have been placed in competitions and published online, on websites such as Write Out Loud, Poetry 24, The Sentinel. His work is often marked by a satirical regard for the prevailing politics of our age, and he is currently compiling a collection of poems that speaks to many of the themes raised in "Writing in the Wake of the World".
