My PhD research project: Algae Ecologies: multiple scales, temporalities and perspectives in contemporary poetry, investigates the creative and aesthetic possibilities of how the complex multi-scalar relations between humans, algae and planetary health can be explored in contemporary poetry. My research draws on algae’s vast and microscopic scales, from minute plankton in the ocean to their role in deep time and present-day planetary systems. My thesis’s creative and critical components include literary analysis of poetry (Hymas 2020; Hadfield 2014; Watts 2020; Yang 2008), poetic writing and practice research with environmental scientists. Motivated by Solnick’s (2016) assertion that poetry must find ‘new ways of thinking about unfamiliar spatial and temporal scales, about how we approach the metaphors and discourses of the sciences’ my practice research examines the interplay between different representations of algae across contemporary poetry and science. The cross-disciplinary nature of my project explores what poetic perspectives might emerge and what new ecologies of practice can be built through collaboration with environmental science.