Melanie Dennis Unrau shares a poem from her new collection, "Goose," and offers some context for it in the life and writing of an unlikely worker-poet, Sidney Clarke Ells, the self-styled “father of the tar sands.” Unrau's work examines how literary form registers the contradictions of settler attachment, ecological destruction, and nation-building at the origins of the tar sands, and what it means to read, and remake, those texts now.
Joel Duncan turns to Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island to think through life within petromodernity. Centering on “Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than Students of Zen,” Duncan's essay, like his new book (Poetic Drive), treats poetry as a site of attention to entangled, fossil-fueled life, where responsibility and the possibility of change emerge from sustained presence rather than distance.
Artist Oliver Ressler's "Barricading the Ice Sheets" project investigates the relationship between art and climate justice movements. In this reflection on the project, Ressler articulates the impossibility of neutrality, the role of representation in creating social movements, and the importance of art as a vital space both to reflect on the multi-dimensional climate crisis and to think beyond it.
Venezuela has a long and complicated relationship with oil marked by cycles of hope and despair. Penélope Plaza of the University of Reading explores how three Venezuelan artists are working to break the spell of oil and help set the country on a new path.
There is a growing body of Canadian ecopoetry that takes as its subject the links between oil, land, and colonialism. Poetry scholar Max Karpinski has studied these poets and explains how one of them--Lesley Battler--subtly reuses the bland terminology of the petrochemical industry to create poetic insights into our fossil-fueled condition.
In 2008, Canadian artist Sandra Sawatzky set out to embroider the social history of oil. Nine years and 17, 000 hours of work later, she completed her epic Black Gold Tapestry, which visualizes our relationship to energy like never before.
