Cold Pastoral: Poems

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.