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.
