Post-citizens at the Ends of Poetry Bruno Latour's Gaia faces Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees.

Carol Ann Duffy’s anthology The Bees offers a range of poems on ecology and climate breakdown. The compilation explores how posthuman bodies that matter reinvent their gendered and sexualized subjectivities in an ecologically changing world. The poems could be described as presenting a set of jig-saw pieces which offer interpretative clues; equally well, these pieces cunningly resist being read as interconnected. What emerges between each of the poems are a set of tensions. These invite analyses from what I shall term a ‘post-citizen’ reader. This figure I develop from analysing the concept of the ‘citizen’ from Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Whether material, embodied, constructed, nonhuman and human, the posthuman female, trans or non-binary, is a post-citizen taking their place in the new climatic, that is, climate regime, with all its ongoing instabilities. This chapter will explore Duffy’s anthology as engaging a posthumanist and ecofeminist poetics. It is one through which language can inscribe a necessarily instable subjectivity for the post-citizen reader.