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Delivers an urgent poetics of resistance and appeal for environmental justice for a Saskatchewan community
“We began to dig ourselves
deeper than we dreamed
when we began to see
metal as other than medicine,
our bodies, more than mineral.”
At Rabbit Lake in northern Saskatchewan lies the second largest uranium mine in the western world. For decades, uranium ore and its poisonous by-products—pitchblende, a highly radioactive rock—were removed, transported and scattered across the land, forever altering the lives of plants, animals, and peoples who live there.
Elise Marcella Godfrey’s Pitchblende is a timely, polyvocal, exquisitely crafted poetic intervention into environmental ethics and extractive industries. Inspired by and adapted from testimonies given at the public hearings about the Rabbit Lake mine, Godfrey creates a parallel structure for the found text—and the voices—to colonize. Interconnected, Godfrey’s poems are a chorus of Indigenous Elders and women protesting a destructive, unwanted mine in their community and a visual, literal representation of how industry, capitalism, and colonialism seek to erase these same people and their voices.
Pitchblende is a powerful, political collection that challenges us to urgently rethink our responsibilities to the land, water, and air that sustains all species, and our responsibilities to one another.
— Randy Lundy, author of Blackbird Song and Field Notes for the Self
"A distilled act of witnessing, built from nearly forgotten testimonies."
— Warren Cariou
"In Pitchblende, Elise Marcella Godfrey’s experimentation with poetic form and multiples voices, archival and imagined, to address the fallout of uranium mining that often places profit over ecology, community, and sustainability, is radiant. The poems are alive and magnified with testimony of Indigenous Elders, women, and activists, who are steadfast in their defense of earth’s inhabitants and life-giving forces. Pitchblende is “against forgetting.” In her honest rendering of voices that are often diminished or dismissed, Godfrey has earned the name of ally."
— Rita Bouvier, author of nakamowin’sa