Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas.

The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just.

How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.

Melanie Dennis Unrau is Editor and co-Publisher of Geez magazine. Once a writer of long posts late at night, she now prefers to make art with a group of visual artist mothers who meet in person in Winnipeg. Her writing has appeared in magazines and art shows, and in Exposed, an anthology of emerging Manitoba writers (The Muses' Company, 2002). This is her first collection.

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“A brilliant reflection on the petropoetic logic of extractive, colonial-capitalist industry. For its careful tracing of a distinct tradition of oil-worker poetry and for its acute framing of oil as a substance of contrary infatuation, The Rough Poets is a vital addition to scholarship in Canadian literature and the energy humanities.” Catriona Sandilands, editor of Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times

“A long-overdue examination of the art and interior life of a workforce typically passed over for serious consideration. This book adds much to our understanding of industrial workers as fully realized people with a complex relationship to their labour and with a voice that is bigger, if we listen, than the mantras of oil corporations that have historically dominated the discussion.” Kate Beaton, author of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands