Refinery

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Refinery is a memoir in verse from the vantage point of a young working class female speaker in coastal Alabama. This speaker appears in myriad forms as the child of a father murdered while working in the oil industry, a child grappling with sexual violence and its aftermath, a traitor to the racism and homophobia of the culture that means to claim her, a witness to train wrecks, oil spills, and other unnatural disasters.

Ultimately, it is a tapestry of narrative lyrics from a complex and variegated New South, led by a speaker whose perspective is often left out of cultural conversations.

Refinery is a story of surviving within a system that seeks to confine us all in limited understandings of ourselves and others based on race, class, and gender, and the violence inherent in those limitations. It pushes against the idyllic notion of the rural often found in pastoral poetry, it is an elegy for what cannot be in our current political and socioeconomic stratifications, and it is an ode to what might be made from confronting our complicities. It is an interrogation of contemporary Southern-ness in the hope of writing us into new possibility.