Melanie Dennis Unrau

Goose Melanie Dennis Unrau

Poems that retrace unconscious lines of thought and flight to write a new history of the tar sandsGoose is a collection of hand-traced visual poems made using found text and images from the 1938 and 1956 editions of Northland Trails, a book of self-illustrated short stories, poems, and essays about the Athabasca region authored by “father of the tar sands” S. C. Ells (1878–1971).

Goose takes Ells’s early work surveying, mining, and separating bituminous sand, along with his colonial, racist, and sexist attitudes and aesthetics, as the starting point for an inventive and biting critique of the oil-sands industry and our petromodern energy system. At turns cheeky, sharp-witted, and grave, Goose inverts found-poetry erasure and procedural techniques to explore themes of extraction and the relationship between humans, nonhumans, and the land to enact irreverent, deconstructive literary criticism.