Land of the Dead Is Open for Business
Published on 2. March 2020
80 pages
978-1-945588-63-1 (ISBN)
Description
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 the extractive industries, 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 "e;Sheep / birth limp two-headed things and some / that speak like men if they speak at all."e;
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Jacob Strautmann
The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business
Book
03/2020
Four Way Books
€16.50
Shipment within 3-4 weeks
Content
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- The Boy and the Rafter
- Death of a Young Girl in the Town of Cameron, West Virginia
- What's Left
- Mother's Day
- The Coconut
- The Volunteers
- Advice for a Mountain Laureate
- Swamp Maple
- Goshorn Ridge Proposals
- "Don't Do Me Like That"
- Elementary Monster
- South Garden
- The Leap
- There's Someone at the Door
- My Father's Father's Cadillac
- Honey Locust
- Commencement Day, Banks of the Ohio
- Par Avion
- Cold the Terrible Water
- She Longed to Be a Bird, Whitetail, Stray Dog
- The Joyful Noise Choir, Wolf Run Presbyterian
- The Gift
- The Poet Arrives at the Former Site of the John Brown Trailer Park
- Fork Ridge Right-of-Way
- Mayor Betty's Cameron Crawdad Fest
- Ramp Hunting
- Buffalo Creek
- Killing Frost
- School Bus Brocade
- Monongahela, Allegheny Coal Field . . .
- Who Comes for Keeps
- Appalachia Grotesque
- My Uncle in Eden
- The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business
- Richard's Story
- Report, Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster
- Wheeling Baptism
- The Famous Leap of Major McColloch's Horse
- A Marcellus Shale Primer
- The Assumption
- Mercy Prayer
- For as Long as It Lasts (and It Will Last If Money Can Be Made)
- Benwood Mine and Queen Anne's Lace
- Even Windrows
- Two Doves Gone When He Was Gone (Windmills of Grief)
- Vertical Blinds
- I Dream I Meet Irene McKinney at the Ruined House of the Photographer
- Five String
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
