Cold Pastoral
Poems
Rebecca Dunham
- 80 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Cold Pastoral
Poems
Rebecca Dunham
About This Book
FINALIST FOR THE MIDWEST BOOKSELLERS CHOICE AWARD (POETRY)
A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled waysâunmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster.
On September 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven men and began what would become the largest oil spill ever in US waters. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, leading to a death toll that is still unconfirmed. And in April 2014, the Flint water crisis began, exposing thousands of people to lead-contaminated drinking water. This is the litany of our timeâand these are the events that Rebecca Dunham traces, passionately and brilliantly, in Cold Pastoral.
In poems that incorporate interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sourcesâpoems that adopt the pastoral and elegiac traditions in a landscape where "I can't see the bugs; I don't hear the birds"âDunham invokes the poet as moral witness. "I owe him, " she writes of one man affected by the oil spill, "must learn, at last, how to look."
Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry canâand, perhaps, shouldâbe, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity.