Why are mistakes important to discovery? Are rocks and stones alive? What's the connection between a meteorite and the human heart?

Alyson recently completed an EarthArt Fellowship in the Earth Sciences department of Bristol University, and she is now ready to bring her poems, research and images together into a book.

During the Fellowship, Alyson explored the impact of a meteorite that hit the Earth 15 million years ago and was immediately introduced to mind-boggling science about melting rocks, craters and the creation of billions of tiny diamonds.

She chatted with lecturers, students, researchers, porters, admin staff. What did impact mean to them? How did they relate to meteorites, what had made the biggest change in their lives? As an artist and writer, Alyson wanted to mess up the dividing lines between poetry and science and explore how different disciplines inform and invigorate one another.

Included in the proposed book, Impact, Listening to Bodies on Earth, is a unique experiment that Alyson devised during her Fellowship. The experiment involves listening to rocks as a way of including them as active participants in research and asks how it might be possible to hear things we don't usually hear.

Impact, Listening to Bodies on Earth is a leap into the imaginative galaxy of rocks, language, ethics and love. In a time of climate emergency, it ignites a desire to cherish and respect this astonishing planet and its various relations with the universe.