Our Air

Our Air is a debut poetry collection by Nora Treatbaby, written about Earth and addressed to it. The poems examine systems imposed on people, trees and the planet, among them gender, capitalism, time, wages and exploitation, and look at how these are mapped onto all of them.

The setting is a tangled picture of contemporary life, where big box stores and suburban parking lots sit beside the instructive silence of juniper trees and a pulsing waterfall. Against the backdrop of late-stage capitalism, the collection sketches what ecological and social interdependence might look like.

Treatbaby is a trans woman reckoning with the limits of gender categories, in a book where being a woman is described as "an implausible dream" and "an insane vibration." The poems approach this with sincere curiosity and some light humor. They argue for the world-building possible in a material commitment to gentle friendship with every network of life on Earth.