In one poem, she boards a plane bound for Zurich and promptly falls in love with her seatmate, a stranger to whom, in the poem’s final lines, she cannot help submitting: “Come see me in Vienna, you say. Fernandes, though, uses them to drop pins on a map of attraction, creating a spatial record of erotic life. Poets have long invoked place names as objects of desire. Where, in a poem, is “here”? For Fernandes, it could be New York City, where she lives, or Paris, or Vienna, or any one of the twenty cities that she names in the forty-nine poems of her new collection. Franklin-Wallis quotes a telling remark from Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry: “If the public thinks recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.” Then, when public pressure eases, it quietly abandons its promise and lobbies against any legislation to restrict the use of single-use plastics. Over the years, he writes, “a kind of playbook” has emerged: a company pledges to insure that the packaging for its products gets recycled. In the end, Franklin-Wallis comes to see plastic recycling as smoke and mirrors. He toured another recycling plant, in northern England, where he learned that nearly half the bales of plastic matter it receives can’t be reprocessed because they’re too contaminated. At a recycling plant, in New Delhi, he found workers feeding shredded junk into an extruder, which pumped out little gray microplastic pellets known as nurdles. Then he decided to find out what was actually happening to his garbage. The British journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis used to religiously rinse his plastics before depositing them in one of the color-coded rubbish bins that he and his wife kept at their home.
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