Exploring the science fictions of deep time, Daniel Falb's Chicxulub Paem is an Anthropocene long poem that deliniates the fossilizations and defossilizations of our present moment. It reanimates prehistoric hominins to investigate their sexuality while knowing they exist only on digital devices. It juxtaposes geographies of past and future climate migrations and looks into the geology of the top 1%. Chicxulub Paem is the opening speech of the Holocene Museum.

Denisova 4's canine, a / somewhat superintelligent thing, tossed into / elder care

Chicxulub Paem is part of the The Parapoetics Series - an investigation into the array of possibilities and problems for a transspecies semiotics in various aesthetic modulations. Parapoetics exorcises the all-too-human quest for monopoly over voice, inscription, worlding. Parapoetics revises grammatical categories, pronominal demarcations, and experiments with alternative modes of (re)presentation within a ’we’ of planetary proportions. Parapoetics insists on multispecies storytellings. Parapoetics asks: Who speaks, and on behalf of whom? How do nonhumans, ahumans, inhumans articulate thenselves, and how can ’we’ avoid the anthropocentric error of always measuring these articulations against the arbitrariness of human linguistic signs in order to find only an alleged absence or silence? As Wittgenstein pointed out: as long as our language remains the same, it will seduce us into asking the same questions over and over again. Parapoetics asks what other semiotic possibilities can be afforded to us. It asks how to speculate and engage in parallel vocabularies in unknown sign systems. Parapoetics challenges the ideas of what it means to signify, in what manner significations can manifest themselves, and what promises for our relations to Others a poetry in an expanded, transhuman field might hold.

The Parapoetics Series is co-published by Broken Dimanche Press and Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology. It is designed by Fuchs Borst.

Daniel Falb is a poet and philosopher based in Berlin. He acquired a PhD in philosophy with a thesis on the notion of collectivity at Freie Universität Berlin in 2012 and has published three volumes of poetry with Berlin-based publisher kookbooks: die räumung dieser parks (2003), BANCOR (2009), and CEK (2015). His work besides poetry focuses mostly on geophilosophy, radical ecology, and poetology. Recent publications include Anthropozän. Dichtung in der Gegenwartsgeologie (Verlagshaus Berlin 2015). Falb's work has been supported by grants and prizes, most recently the German PEN Center's 'Kurt Sigel-Award for Poetry' (2016). He is currently working on a book on geophilosophical metaphysics (Geospekulationen), to be published in late 2017.