Seasonal Adversities: An Ekphrasis on the Climate Crisis by Joel M. Toledo and Pancho Alvarez

In SEASONAL ADVERSITIES, Joel Toledo and Panch Alvarez open a new climate consciousness in both form and content, engaging the reader in true testimony: a brilliant hybrid collection, a lyric memoir from an archipelago in the global South receiving the brunt of ecological disaster. With terrible times come new forms of resilience. Toledo's text with its transcendent echos and Alvarez's images dance like visual music across these pages, their pauses filled with irony, rage, tenderness, invitation. As Toledo writes, "our eyes strain to catch the halo’s completion." Their readers end up lucky, better for the blast of their invention.
- Edie Meidav

It has been heartbreaking to witness the increasingly divided and polarised times through which we are living. One of the joys of Joel and Panch’s work is that they take us into a space where collaboration demonstrably uplifts and strengthens their individual talents. With enormous grace and beauty, they weave their gifts to create verbal and visual, emotional and intellectual vistas that take us into the heart of the ‘seasonal adversities’ they focus on. The vision, the integration of styles and ideas, the passion that beats through every word and brushstroke, every sentence and colour: all of this takes those of us who aren’t scientists, who aren’t technical specialists, who aren’t intellectually focused on climate issues, into the very centre of the impact, the implications, and the sheer devastation of ongoing ‘natural’ disasters. Panch and Joel give us hope as well as beauty – hope that integrating our skills and knowledge (as they have), and working together to recount and build on his and her stories of collective responses to natural and human made disasters will lead us to ways of overcoming these current challenges. The bridging of their work and styles gives me hope that we can find creative and inspiring bridges to our collective futures.
- Theo Sowa

This beautiful collaboration between two uniquely talented artists reminds us of what is most urgent and what is evergreen, and in the process helps us find hope in disaster.
- Ai-jen Poo