“Rooted in her own experience of the climate crisis as a new mother, Sarah Marie Wiebe takes us through the deep and necessary work of care in times of overlapping crises. Combining incisive analysis with lyrical narrative, Wiebe bravely guides her reader through the mess of our times; this mess is sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, and always hot. Timely and gripping, this book is a powerful rallying cry for radical care.”—Rebecca Hall, author of Refracted Economies: Diamond Mining and Social Reproduction in the North.

“Wiebe’s critical ecofeminist and maternal analysis delves into the slow sensory politics of crisis. She demonstrates how the messiness of our scaling grief—both personal and collective, ecological and otherwise—is intimately tied to structures of neoliberalism, settler colonialism, patriarchy, racism, capitalism, and global extractivism.”—Jeffrey Ansloos, associate professor, Indigenous health and social policy, University of Toronto.

“Hot Mess makes you deeply aware of how fires, smoke, drought, pollution, and climate emergencies are embodied experiences. Wiebe makes a compelling argument for how the world we live in requires a prismatic thinking that considers how these embodied experiences become entangled with structural inequalities, historical systematic exclusions, and relations of domination with the non-human world. However, instead of being flooded with anxiety and powerlessness, the author calls upon all of us to make friends with our bodies, the bodies of others and those of the non-human world. Centering a mother-child relationship, Wiebe asks what our environmental future may look like if we enacted relationships of care, respect and reciprocity with the non-human world and Indigenous communities. This is a text that we all should read.”—Isabel Altamirano Jiménez, Canada Research Chair in Comparative Indigenous Feminist Studies.