This project analyzes uses of sound in poetic responses to catastrophes from peripheral island spaces. How can we learn from direct reactions to natural disasters in the wake of global warming? How can literary methods capture a language attuned with furious rains, crushing winds and flooding waters? There is a blatant yet often overlooked rationale behind such an investigation: while the climate crisis is a planetary one, it is lived locally; in and on bodies, in and through grief and struggles. Nonetheless, theories of the Anthropocene typically focus on the large scale. Equally, in literary ecocriticism, the novel is often privileged over more succinct, immediate expressions. This project wants to counterbalance these planetary approaches to the specific question of literature’s role in on-going climate crises by looking at Caribbean local poetic ways of expressing, configuring and ultimately responding to natural catastrophes. Caribbean literatures will serve as a point of departure for exploring new modes of reading the immersive effects of climate change and developing a literary theory that foregrounds sonic aspects searching for echoes, vibrations and resonance as alternative ways to relating to and existing in a world of turbulence. This project’s contribution is to highlight the creativity of Islanders as a resource for thinking and learning, arguing that poetic expressions are crucial vectors for knowledge about the lived experience of natural forces.