The Long Now Conditions Permit confronts the persistent brutalities of our world through poetry that both names and resists the injustices shaping it. From the quiet sorrows of everyday slight to the overwhelming crises of ecological collapse and gendered violence, these poems document what is occurring—the horrendous and the intimate, the anguished and the magnificent.

With ethical attention, Jami Macarty’s collection engages the political, ecological, and personal forces that shape and mark our lives, offering an ecofeminist ethic of care as an antidote to extractive capitalism and patriarchal norms. Each poem meditates on power, insists on articulating what is being lost—and what must be saved and reclaimed. 

Amid the exploitation and violence, these poems find moments of grace: the scent of a sea rose, a desert walk in spring, the company of birds, Earth entire. The Long Now Conditions Permit is both tender elegy and urgent call, exhorting readers to grapple with the devastating failings of humanity and the saving possibilities of love. 

Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses, winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award-Poetry Arizona, and four chapbooks, including The Whole Catastrophe and Mind of Spring, winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Macarty’s writing is supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council, and the generous editors of such American and Canadian literary magazines as Colorado Review, Interim, Vallum, and Volt. Macarty supports other writers as an independent mentor, editor, and reviewer, and as a creative writing teacher at Simon Fraser University. Macarty lives in and learns from the arborescent desert around Tucson, Arizona, and the rain coast of Vancouver, British Columbia.