Cold Pastoral

A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled ways--unmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster. The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Hurricane Katrina. The Flint water crisis. Thousands dead, lives destroyed, and a natural world imperiled by human choices. This is the litany of our time--and 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 sources--poems that adopt the pastoral and elegiac traditions in a landscape where "I can't see the bugs; I don't hear the birds"--Dunham finds the intersection between moral witness and shattering art. Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry can--and, perhaps, should--be, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity.