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Join author Melanie Dennis Unrau in conversation with Josiah Neufeld to celebrate the launch of The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s University Press).https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9780228022947/melanie-dennis-unrau/the-rough-poets
This event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a YouTube stream: https://youtube.com/live/XvUqvSqT9LQ
The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.
Melanie Dennis Unrau is a poet of mixed European ancestry living on Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Red River Métis in Winnipeg. A SSHRC Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in geography/environmental studies and English at the University of Regina, she is the author of Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company) and a new poetry collection, Goose, forthcoming with Assembly Press in 2025. Melanie is a former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine. Current projects include “Groundwork: Poems about Working Life in the Climate Crisis,” a poetry anthology she is co-editing as part of the Land and Labour Poetry Collective (forthcoming with Fernwood Publishing in 2025).
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1120 Grant Avenue, Winnipeg, MB, Canada, Manitoba R3M 2A6
