The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business

"Poems of urgent beauty that give voice to a region of people who have been silenced or ignored. The Land of the Dead is Open for Business is an extended elegy for Jacob Strautmann's home state of West Virginia and its generations of inhabitants sold out by the false promise of the American Dream. Throughout the book, voices rise up from the page to describe a landscape eroded and plundered by runaway capitalism-its mountain tops leveled by fracking, its waters polluted by runoff from mines-and the fallout from that waste. Those who remain are consigned to life in a ravaged land denuded of nature where birds die and "Sheep/birth limp two-headed things and some / that speak like men if they speak at all." "thing, /the multitudes in me and the multitudes in you.""--