Oh Man,
Oh Man,
Illustrious silk-pyjamaed occupier
of lofts, conference rooms,
palazzos and penthouses!
'Tis I who awaken thee!

In no uncertain terms, human excrement addresses itself to man, his creator. In this highly original poem, mankind is admonished: we think it stinks but it is also the beginning, because "From me springs the Garden of Eden".

At the request of Winternachten international literature festival The Hague, poet Annemarie Estor gave a voice to 'non-humans'. A voice that is missing in our vision of the world and is of great added value. The reading by Estor of her poem Canto excrementis - in its English version, translated by Rosalind Buck - was filmed on location by Nils van der Linden and shown for the first time in the programme #BackToEarth: Tout-monde, streamed live on Saturday 16 January 2021.

• Read here the poem Canto excrementis by Annemarie Estor, translated to English by Rosalind Buck.

The image that we have of our world is purely human: a human-centred picture. It's up to us to give non-humans a voice and a stage. That's why in #BackToEarth: Tout-monde, the programme created by Nisrine Mbarki for the online Winternachten festival 2021, we gave the floor to the non-human elements of our world. It was an existentially poetic evening in which the world was experienced from a different, more complete, perspective.

Annemarie Estor (Belgium) is a poet, essyaist and illustrator of her literary works. She has twice won the Herman de Coninck Prize: for her debut poetry collection Vuurdoorn me (Firethorn Me) in 2011 and for De oksels van de bok (The Buck's Armpits) in 2013. In 2015 she published Dit is geen theater meer (This Isn't Theatre Anymore). An erotic or more generally sensual and sensory approach is characteristic of her poetry. Her collection Niemandslandnacht (No-Man's-Land Night) is a "crime poem" about a divided city where little is what it seems: It's a world of extremes, exotic but often terribly recognizable. It was awarded the 2018 Jan Campert Prize. In 2020 she published the poetry collection De bruidsvlucht (The Bride Flight) en the long poem Een nieuwe biotoop (A New Biotope) in Zwemlessen voor later (Swimming Lessons for Later), a collection of climate poems by 160 Dutch and Flemish poets.