In the Natural History Museum in London, with tired feet and a heavy toddler in arms, Will Small looked at the fossil record of ancient species and couldn't shake this question: when someone studies us, what will they find?

This collection moves between hills hoists and climate collapse, bath bombs and prayer, the death of the family dog and the deaths of children in places we scroll past. ​God loses faith in humanity. A chatbot gives home renovation advice. Human inefficiency is celebrated.

Funny where it needs to be, and devastating where it earns the right to be, The Fossil of Us doesn't resolve the tension between the smallness of our daily lives and the scale of what we're facing. It insists that tension is where we must live.

"In these poems, the ordinary acts of living, grieving, laughing and tending become the fragile, luminous record of what it meant to be human.”

— Sara M. Saleh, Award Winning Writer and Human Rights Lawyer