Opened Ribs are a Church Full of Sky

These poems move from family gatherings to hospital corridors, from blind veterans' gardens to walk-in freezers, examining how memory and loss shape our understanding of both personal and collective history. Capturing contradictions of contemporary English life—where algorithms measure human engagement, ancient traditions persist in digital spaces, and orange centipedes become ‘polished stone’—Mears explores how personal histories intersect with both cultural moments and ecological processes. Through observations of how bodies interface with their environments—eggs crying into themselves, ribs opening to sky—these poems create a portrait of life that is both deeply specific and universally resonant, poems that pull at the permeable boundaries between human and more-than-human worlds.