Oil Courses (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781606355114)

Grounded in deep concern about the climate crisis, Carolyn
Williams-Noren's Oil Courses recalls a family reliant on the oil
industry--her father worked for British Petroleum in Anchorage, Alaska--and a
summer spent in its service on Endicott Island. What "curriculum" has oil
offered each of us? To answer, Oil Courses turns to strange happenings in
the changing landscape and in our interior lives, magnifying odd scenes that
once seemed ordinary and filing them under the names of school subjects such as
physics, economics, and history.

In these poems, the absurd, the
beautiful, and the alarming collide. Tiny fish begin to swim sideways,
poisoned. The permafrost melts. Whales are hunted and skinned. The high school
yearbook features students who have hit moose with their cars. A polar bear is
spotted at a distance through binoculars, and the tundra is viewed both up
close and from a plane window.

This collection is also an
evocative snapshot of American girlhood in the late '80s and early '90s. A
shopping mall with an ice rink opens, Sassy magazine comes in the mail,
bedroom closets become shrines covered in photos of teen heartthrobs, and bangs
are teased high. Boys make insensitive comments. Still, the particularities of
geography persist: A teacher warns her students that "the earth / could open
and take anything away." The speaker of one poem wins a trophy for an essay on
the subject "What Petroleum Means to Me," presented by a group
of women she derisively calls the "Petroleum Wives."

Oil Courses speaks to our
collective reliance on exploitative industries and questions our
responsibilities and relationships to the natural world. These poems are droll,
revealing, and ultimately haunting.