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Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields
In Shale Play, acclaimed poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf and award-winning documentary photographer Steven Rubin explore the small towns, farms, and forests of Appalachian Pennsylvania to gather the stories of these places and the working people who inhabit them.
In the parlance of the oil and gas industry, "shale play" refers to a region exploited for its natural gas by means of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling--transient industrial processes that often occur far from the populations that benefit from them. Amid polarized claims about fracking and pressure to develop these areas around the world, this project gathers evidence from everyday life in the Marcellus Shale Play. Kasdorf and Rubin follow in the footsteps of the documentarians of the 1930s, such as the artists and writers of the Works Progress Administration, taking a deliberate and thoughtful approach to gather the stories of workers on pipelines and well pads, landowners and leaseholders, waitresses, ministers, farmers, retired miners, teachers, and neighbors. The resulting collage of vivid oral and pictorial testimony reveals the natural beauty of rural places as well as the disturbance and spectacle fracking creates.
A passionate work of witness, Shale Play invites the reader to look beyond the easy caricatures of the white working class to create an urgent, authentic representation of a sacrifice zone that fuels America.
In the parlance of the oil and gas industry, "shale play" refers to a region exploited for its natural gas by means of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling--transient industrial processes that often occur far from the populations that benefit from them. Amid polarized claims about fracking and pressure to develop these areas around the world, this project gathers evidence from everyday life in the Marcellus Shale Play. Kasdorf and Rubin follow in the footsteps of the documentarians of the 1930s, such as the artists and writers of the Works Progress Administration, taking a deliberate and thoughtful approach to gather the stories of workers on pipelines and well pads, landowners and leaseholders, waitresses, ministers, farmers, retired miners, teachers, and neighbors. The resulting collage of vivid oral and pictorial testimony reveals the natural beauty of rural places as well as the disturbance and spectacle fracking creates.
A passionate work of witness, Shale Play invites the reader to look beyond the easy caricatures of the white working class to create an urgent, authentic representation of a sacrifice zone that fuels America.
- GenresPoetry
144 pages, Hardcover
First published July 20, 2018
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24 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 21, 2018
This collection, which combines poetry and photographs, has everything that I want in a poetry book: poems of social justice, photographs of my homestate, and a fine exploration of environmental and social justice. Wonderful!
May 20, 2019
These docu-poems are FIRE!
June 24, 2019
A many layered production & w/these layers an assertion of importance: hard back, color pictures, multiple forwards, endnotes documenting sources. A book that strives to aesthetically, academically, and ethically match the magnitude of the crisis that is the blitzkrieg of fracking Pennsylvania has endured. A state riveted by wells, pipe, and compressor stations, its web of life injected w/a toxic slurry: tumors, fire shooting from faucets, checkpoints manned by company security, more.
JK & SR working firmly in the Muriel Rukeyser, WPA project mold (Kasdorf links her project to Rukeyser’s) or we might say the Ebony magazine Gwendolyn Brooks + photog mode that produce In Montgomery. She pairs documentary poems (mostly compressed, lineated, and stanza-ed conversation transcripts with portraits of people and landscapes across one hundred pages.
The Good.
-There are memorable portraits, particularly of town hall meetings that juxtapose the cold anger and exhaustion of citizens and that stupid zipped face look of public officials who are clearly just trying to wait out the clock.
-Kasdorf has an ability to find ppl who can tell their stories of developing environmental illnesses, estrangement from topoi they’ve known their whole lives, and fight-back against gas companies with startling detail, dignity and sometimes humor. Gas and pipe workers talk about the ups and downs of the job, mostly with mixed feelings, which is probably encouraging for any ecosocialist out there who thinks ppl would jump at the chance for green jobs. They would! Kasdorf’s workers don’t have illusions about what they’re doing but also don’t see any better options. Though perhaps this is self selecting: the only ones that would talk....
Most memorable to me, probably because it hasn’t been a part of the environmental narratives and doc poems I’ve read, were the accounts of families who took deals offered by gas companies and come to regret doing so. In “Sealed Record” a court transcript reveals a family’s misgivings when they discover their NDA with the gas company covers their children and makes theme liable for anything their children say. Their attorney: “Frankly, Your Honor, as an attorney, I don’t know if it’s possible to give up the First Amendment rights of a child.” The fracking’s slow violence includes toxic ecosystems sickening families for generations—and generations of silence. Because Kasdorf sticks so closely to people relating their experiences in their own words, what Shale Play adds that a lot of top-down critiques of the gas industry don’t is the sheer speed at which energy companies strike, leveraging their massive resources to buy up political influence and land, to install infrastructure, and to wage a disinformation campaign before anyone knows what the fuck is going on. Story after story puts us in that lurch, recounts roads and compressor stations popping up overnight. People doing their daily routines when suddenly their dog has a tumor in his jaw from licking some chemical from its paws and the whole landscape becoming changed in this flash. So, yeah, I think this is a valuable contribution to the archive of documentary poetry and current environmental literature revealing as a catastrophe our nation’s embrace of gas as an alternative energy source to coal and oil.
The Meh.
-I was at a talk and reading from this book where Kasdorf echoed a major theme of Barbara Hurd’s introduction to this book: that it’s important to avoid dogma and hear from both sides. Hurd concludes “Maybe such listening will sway the legislators and regulators in Pennsylvania to rethink their policies on fracking.” A biology professor/activist upended the end of Kasdorf’s talk by asking Kasdorf what she was actually doing to fight back against dirty energy companies then proceeded to tell folks about several actions she was organizing. It was really confrontational and intense! While I don’t share this biology professor’s desire to shame people for not doing enough, I do share her frustration with the mushy humanist, we-just-need-to-understand-both-sides-ism that creeps into the framing of the book--especially when its the telos of that framing. Like, goddamn, the world needs a more pointed documentary poetics than this.
JK & SR working firmly in the Muriel Rukeyser, WPA project mold (Kasdorf links her project to Rukeyser’s) or we might say the Ebony magazine Gwendolyn Brooks + photog mode that produce In Montgomery. She pairs documentary poems (mostly compressed, lineated, and stanza-ed conversation transcripts with portraits of people and landscapes across one hundred pages.
The Good.
-There are memorable portraits, particularly of town hall meetings that juxtapose the cold anger and exhaustion of citizens and that stupid zipped face look of public officials who are clearly just trying to wait out the clock.
-Kasdorf has an ability to find ppl who can tell their stories of developing environmental illnesses, estrangement from topoi they’ve known their whole lives, and fight-back against gas companies with startling detail, dignity and sometimes humor. Gas and pipe workers talk about the ups and downs of the job, mostly with mixed feelings, which is probably encouraging for any ecosocialist out there who thinks ppl would jump at the chance for green jobs. They would! Kasdorf’s workers don’t have illusions about what they’re doing but also don’t see any better options. Though perhaps this is self selecting: the only ones that would talk....
Most memorable to me, probably because it hasn’t been a part of the environmental narratives and doc poems I’ve read, were the accounts of families who took deals offered by gas companies and come to regret doing so. In “Sealed Record” a court transcript reveals a family’s misgivings when they discover their NDA with the gas company covers their children and makes theme liable for anything their children say. Their attorney: “Frankly, Your Honor, as an attorney, I don’t know if it’s possible to give up the First Amendment rights of a child.” The fracking’s slow violence includes toxic ecosystems sickening families for generations—and generations of silence. Because Kasdorf sticks so closely to people relating their experiences in their own words, what Shale Play adds that a lot of top-down critiques of the gas industry don’t is the sheer speed at which energy companies strike, leveraging their massive resources to buy up political influence and land, to install infrastructure, and to wage a disinformation campaign before anyone knows what the fuck is going on. Story after story puts us in that lurch, recounts roads and compressor stations popping up overnight. People doing their daily routines when suddenly their dog has a tumor in his jaw from licking some chemical from its paws and the whole landscape becoming changed in this flash. So, yeah, I think this is a valuable contribution to the archive of documentary poetry and current environmental literature revealing as a catastrophe our nation’s embrace of gas as an alternative energy source to coal and oil.
The Meh.
-I was at a talk and reading from this book where Kasdorf echoed a major theme of Barbara Hurd’s introduction to this book: that it’s important to avoid dogma and hear from both sides. Hurd concludes “Maybe such listening will sway the legislators and regulators in Pennsylvania to rethink their policies on fracking.” A biology professor/activist upended the end of Kasdorf’s talk by asking Kasdorf what she was actually doing to fight back against dirty energy companies then proceeded to tell folks about several actions she was organizing. It was really confrontational and intense! While I don’t share this biology professor’s desire to shame people for not doing enough, I do share her frustration with the mushy humanist, we-just-need-to-understand-both-sides-ism that creeps into the framing of the book--especially when its the telos of that framing. Like, goddamn, the world needs a more pointed documentary poetics than this.
May 1, 2020
If you will read one book about fracking in Pennsylvania, let it be this volume of poetry and photographs. A careful, detailed, moving, and respectful accounting of the people, the land, and what fracking has done to both.
March 26, 2021
Heartbreaking. Powerful. Moving.
January 8, 2019
Poetry and photographs from the fracking fields of Pennsylvania where people have traded their forests, farms, rivers, animals, good health, dignity and sense of community for a pocketful of money.
(and a limited-perspective comment about libraries from my blog)
(and a limited-perspective comment about libraries from my blog)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews