Concrete and Canopy : The City as a Habitat

About The Book

Concrete and Canopy: The City as a Habitat is a collection of 42 poems that looks closely at the life persisting within the modern city. Trees push through pavement, weeds reclaim vacant lots, moss grows beneath subway lights, and birds, insects, and other creatures find ways to inhabit spaces shaped by human construction.

Moving through streets, rooftops, rivers, railway corridors, parks, and forgotten corners, these poems explore the uneasy relationship between concrete infrastructure and the living world around it. Heat, flooding, light pollution, disappearing habitats, and the traces of human activity appear alongside quieter moments of adaptation, persistence, and renewal.

Rather than treating nature and the city as separate worlds, the collection asks us to notice the habitats already forming between them. A storm drain becomes a temporary river; a vacant lot becomes a small ecosystem; a rooftop puddle briefly holds the sky; a subway station becomes a place where moss can survive.

Concrete and Canopy is ultimately a poetic record of coexistence—a collection that invites us to notice the wild lives that remain, adapt, and continue to make a home among us.

About The Author 

Gopu M. Sunil is a poet from Keralam, India, whose work explores nature, urban landscapes, memory, place, and the relationship between human life and the more-than-human world. His poetry often finds ecological and emotional significance in ordinary surroundings, from trees, rivers, and birds to streets, abandoned spaces, and changing landscapes.

His poems have appeared in literary publications Including Amsterdam Quarterly, The Lake Poetry, Parcham Magazine, and Tiger Moth Review. He is currently pursuing a B.A. in English at Government College Tripunithura, Keralam.

Concrete and Canopy: The City as a Habitat is his first poetry collection.