Fossilised Lightning

Fossilised Lightning explores interactions with natural forces and celebrates the mysterious messiness of Earth’s ecosystems. It embeds humans in the natural world, evokes Earth's sensory gifts, and moves beyond nature poetry into ecopoetry by advocating for renewed environmental relationships.

With these poems the authors weave an expedition through underworlds and overworlds, enhancing planetary awareness by way of plant cocktails, rogue atoms, snake temples, seaweed jewels, and restless stars, and striving to shift reader consciousness just as the writing shifted theirs.

Fossilised Lightning is print published by Girls on Key Poetry 2021.

Fuelling this tour-de-force collaboration between Nicole Rain Sellers and Rebecca Trowbridge is balance-on-the-high-beam writing that’s nevertheless “tethered wholly to earth.” Its deeply imagined world of natural forces is both intimately factual and mythic in reach. Biology, geology, bodies, spirits, hearts, minds – it’s all there, transformed by high-energy writing into crawling, flowing, biting, swarming, dying, growing, skittering life.
- Ross Gillett

This collaborative venture of innovative poetics and commitment to living with justice to the earth shines with evocation like magic.
- Phillip Hall

In light of this precarious time of threat to our planetary life-support systems, environmental poetics of this kind are curiously (and perhaps necessarily) unsettling. Nicole Rain Sellers and Rebecca Trowbridge have a gift for imaginative language and their poems are exciting to read.
- Cassandra O'Loughlin

Geology meets mythology in this collection of beautifully crafted insights into the earth and its undercurrents.
- Kelly Baxter

Table of Contents:
Come for a Swim
Wood Wide Web
Green Point Loop Track
Cacti's Priorities
Grace
Awed: May I Serve You?
How to Become a Fountain
Lichen Serenade
Seclusion
The Snake Temple
Ode to My Axial Skeleton
What They Might Sing
Dégustation
Excreta
Lady Firebrand Calls the Sea by Name
Mama Crocodile
Song for Clíodhna
Black Smoker
Sun Coat
Skitter
Conquest
Dead Ghost Gums in the Paddock Seem to Pose
All There Is
Boab
A Difficult Bond
Sleeping Cow
Shepherd's Warning
Verses on a Crushed Egg Carton
The Exosphere
She Who Unbraids Time
Better Than Rage
Papa Gondwana
Author Note – Nicole Rain Sellers
Author Note – Rebecca Trowbridge