A Year of Misreading the Wildcats

"This book is evidence of unusually ebullient thinking about the spongy and interbred archives of petropolitics & necropolitics—life and death produced for/from the manna of fossil fuels—which Tierney parses, imbricates, and translates into poems that are wet and living, petrified and stony, made of paper and people, just like the range of archives she plumbs....This is a work of remarkable insight, confident tonal variance, and playful intelligence." - Divya Victor, author of Kith "This haunting and profound collection explores the traces of petroleum refineries, factories, landfills, train stations, nuclear power plants, and other sacrifice zones in the United States, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and the Pacific Islands. Throughout, Tierney creates an archive of oily verse, cut-up essays, textual collage, and actual polaroids to capture the elastic entanglements between 'humans' and the 'planet,' between 'carbonauts' and the 'plastisphere.' As companion readers, we are guided into the troubling 'Urf' and urged to discuss: Can poetry help us navigate unseen ecologies? Can poetry become a carbon sink? Can poetry metabolize the world so that we can continue to grow and love with 'concussive tenderness'?" —Craig Santos Perez "a year of misreading the wildcats follows intrepid petronaut Orchid Tierney as she painstakingly assembles a nonce archive of the 'waste