A singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America s most innovative political poets, Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, West Virginia miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation s curriculum for schoolchildren, newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China, and full-color photographs of Chinese miners by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh.
A poet and labor activist heralded by Adrienne Rich for regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature, Mark Nowak regularly leads transnational poetry workshops between American and international trade unions. The author of Revenants and Shut Up Shut Down, he is also a frequent contributor to the Poetry Foundation s Harriet blog.