Overview

Poems that retrace unconscious lines of thought and flight to write a new history of the tar sands Tracing words the way a tracker moves across land,Goose collects hand-copied details from Northland Trails, abook of self-illustrated short stories, poems, and essays about theAthabasca region authored by ""father of the tar sands"" S. C. Ells.At turns cheeky, sharp-witted, and grave, Melanie Dennis Unrau'spoems explore extraction and the relationship between humans, non-humans, and the land, resulting in an act of irreverent, deconstructiveliterary criticism.

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9781998336210

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Reviews

Praise for Melanie Dennis Unrau's previous work ""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 ""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

""Goose is a masterful work of reinterpretation, revealing brilliant strands of critique and resistance within the romanticized poems and drawings of the self-styled 'father of the tar sands.' Language, image, land and labouring bodies break free of Sidney Ells’s narrow preconceptions here, unravelling the colonial logic of extractive industry and presenting instead a vibrant, nuanced way of understanding energy and belonging.""—Warren Cariou, author of Lake of the Prairies ""Honk if you’re ready to ruffle the colonial archive! Goose is one of those rare and wonderful works that just sits beautifully, irreverently, and wholly in its hybridity, its experimentation, and its genre-bending and never once tries to justify itself. In this sharp, witty, funny, and deeply political collection, Melanie Dennis Unrau raises a delicately inked middle finger to extractivist nostalgia. Tracing and transforming the settler boosterism of Sidney Clarke Ells, she reclaims the page with each gestural mark and cheeky erasure. The result is, like every goose, fierce, silly, and totally ungovernable.""—Dani Spinosa, author of OO: Typewriter Poems ""Goose is far more than experimental poetry: it is call and response, disintegration and repair. These poems cast a long, hard look at S.C. Ells’s contributions, as 'the father of the tar sands,' to the colonial prosperity of Alberta and the ecological devastation that followed in his and others’ footsteps. The collection speaks from within the stacks of the archives and the living tissue of community stories; ebullient and interrogatory, these poems sound their presence as clearly as the geese.""—Jenna Butler, author of Revery: A Year of Bees

Praise for Goose ""Honk if you’re ready to ruffle the colonial archive! Goose is one of those rare and wonderful works that just sits beautifully, irreverently, and wholly in its hybridity, its experimentation, and its genre-bending and never once tries to justify itself. In this sharp, witty, funny, and deeply political collection, Melanie Dennis Unrau raises a delicately inked middle finger to extractivist nostalgia. Tracing and transforming the settler boosterism of Sidney Clarke Ells, she reclaims the page with each gestural mark and cheeky erasure. The result is, like every goose, fierce, silly, and totally ungovernable.""—Dani Spinosa, author of OO: Typewriter Poems Praise for Melanie Dennis Unrau's previous work ""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 ""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

Author Information

Melanie Dennis Unrau is a poet, editor, scholar, and climate organizer of mixed European ancestry from Winnipeg, Manitoba, traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Ininiwak, Anishininewuk, Dakota Oyate, and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Red River Metis. She is the author of the literary study The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024) and the poetry collection Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses' Company, 2013). A former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine, Melanie also co-edited I'll Get Right on It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Fernwood, 2025).

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