The Rough Poets

Celebrating oil-worker poetry as a literary phenomenon, an indictment of extractive culture, and a rallying cry for climate justice.

A rallying cry for climate justice, The Rough Poets introduces the reader to poetry that is ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest, and to oil-worker poets who grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the future of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just.

Melanie Dennis Unrau is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Banting postdoctoral fellow in geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina.

Melanie Dennis Unrau is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Banting postdoctoral fellow in geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina.

“A brilliant reflection on the petropoetic logic of extractive, colonial-capitalist industry. For its careful tracing of a distinct tradition of oil-worker poetry and for its acute framing of oil as a substance of contrary infatuation, The Rough Poets is a vital addition to scholarship in Canadian literature and the energy humanities.” Catriona Sandilands, editor of Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times

“A long-overdue examination of the art and interior life of a workforce typically passed over for serious consideration. This book adds much to our understanding of industrial workers as fully realized people with a complex relationship to their labour and with a voice that is bigger, if we listen, than the mantras of oil corporations that have historically dominated the discussion.” Kate Beaton, author of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands