-Deep time is time / that can not be erased"With empathy and playfulness, with startle and delight, Jaspreet Singh explores the fragility, beauty, and sorrow of the dreaming and waking worlds. a work of remarkable intellect," wrote the poet Donna Kane about How to Hold a Pebble. In Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock, Singh deepens his exploration of climate, language, migration, decolonization, and the Anthropocene with an energy both acrobatic and intimate. Interweaving the personal, local, global, and geologic with hidden histories, these poems invite possibilities and defy neat closures, leaving readers with an indelible view of deep time. An ancestor's words in a diary, a child's chalk drawing, solar panels that smile like an ancient god, the Great Oxygenation Event: the gaze of these poems is vast, eclectic, and awestruck, while also remaining clear-eyed about the futures that await our planet. Her unironed face / smiling on behalf of the earth. You don't have such words in your language / You don't have such words in your language

Jaspreet Singh’s short pieces have appeared in Granta, Brick, Walrus, Zoetrope, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and the New York Times. He is the author of the novels Helium, Chef, and Face; the story collection Seventeen Tomatoes; the poetry collections November and How to Hold a Pebble; and the memoir My Mother, My Translator. He is a recipient of several awards and has been translated into many languages. He lives in Calgary, the traditional territory and home to the diverse Indigenous peoples such as: Niitsitapi, Siksika, Kainai, Piikuni, Tsuut'ina, Métis, Îyâxe Nakoda. You can find him online at jaspreetsinghauthor.com

Jaspreet Singh's profile page

"I love everything about [the collection]. [A]midst the science, the insistent internationality, his iterative considerations of translation, his lingering focus on our ecological crisis, [Jaspreet] Singh manages to write with such an amiable, provocatively thoughtful but direct syntax. The overriding questions the poems ask-Where is the place of the human in geological time? What, if anything, distinguishes "I" from "we-ness"-are the most profound questions of our moment." -Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Be With

"Jaspreet Singh is a restless traveller and writer, a chronicler of the magnitude of destruction we exact upon each other and the earth. He's also a lyric chemist, willing to mix genres and play with traditional forms. Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock reads like a eureka moment in the lifelong experiment, where the heaviness and inhospitable toxicity of the Anthropocene is lifted, briefly, on the breaks and in the breath." -Nick Thran, award-winning author of If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display and Earworm

"Jaspreet Singh's poems correlate despair and loving attention in our age of earth ravage. They do this whimsically, often with humour at human unconsciousness, even as he probes his own unconscious through dream and childhood memory. In lines that extend to prose or shrink to haiku, what shines through is their remarkable accuracy, lucid, immediate to our time. This book speaks to/for so many." -Daphne Marlatt, award-winning author of Ana Historic and The Given

"Extraordinary. These poems spark an inexplicable sensation." -Kim Nekarda, visual artist, Berlin

"How do you write poetry, as the familiar Earth that nurtured you turns-and turns for real and forever-into a different planet? Jaspreet Singh's evocative, delicately crafted lines explore the rubicon we have all crossed, while never losing sight of human nuance. It's a memorable, thought-provoking collection." -Jan Zalasiewicz, prominent geologist and author of The Earth After Us

"A book alone cannot repair the world, but, in its shapeshifting dance between hope and loss, fear and affirmation, Jaspreet Singh's Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock is a manual for reparation. "Poetry makes some / things happen," asserts "What We Call Beauty," contra Auden, in Singh's work by eschewing rhetoric or false lyricism, teaching new words, hovering in far places-the Indus Valley, Andes, Oceania-before extractive capitalism altered them. In these slant poems, ravaged life itself speaks, or dreams aloud, making "Ghost Acoustic Interventions." "If views clash we'll practice / speaking untranslatable words / together," Singh writes in "Iktsuarpok," prodding us to listen as the extra-human world dreams itself. Opening up the spaces between human words, suggesting a million other voices, Singh's is radical version of Keats's Negative Capability, exactly needed at this moment to help us wake from our stale dreams of dominion." -Natania Rosenfeld, author of Wild Domestic and The Blue Bed

"From coral reefs to Punjabi songs at Tim Hortons, Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock transports us to poetic illuminations that are meditative and surprising. Through science, sound, Cervantes, and the geology of Alberta, Singh intersects lyrical ecocriticism with the personal in our moment of climate crises. Singh is a poet of light." -Shazia Hafiz Ramji, award-winning author of Port of Being