Articles

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.

In this Author’s Note, Josephine Taylor outlines the intellectual and ethical foundations of her recent book, The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy, tracing how animal life has been rendered absent within dominant energy narratives. Drawing on animal studies, energy humanities, and science fiction, she argues for an ethics of witnessing multispecies vulnerability as a way to rethink extraction, petroculture, and the possibilities of a world after oil.

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.

Mariel Kieval analyzes Kazakhstan’s state museums as cultural sites where fossil fuels continue to structure national identity, even as the government promotes a green transition. Drawing on fieldwork across multiple cities, the piece shows how exhibitions and artworks valorize oil while sidelining labor unrest and environmental harm, revealing how energy transition remains culturally unresolved.