Oil Courses - Carolyn Williams-Noren

Grounded in deep concern about the climate crisis, Carolyn Williams-Noren's Oil Courses recalls a family reliant on the oil industry—her father worked for British Petroleum in Anchorage, Alaska—and a summer spent in its service on Endicott Island. What "curriculum" has oil offered each of us? To answer, Oil Courses turns to strange happenings in the changing landscape and in our interior lives, magnifying odd scenes that once seemed ordinary and filing them under the names of school subjects such as physics, economics, and history.

In these poems, the absurd, the beautiful, and the alarming collide. Tiny fish begin to swim sideways, poisoned. The permafrost melts. Whales are hunted and skinned. The high school yearbook features students who have hit moose with their cars. A polar bear is spotted at a distance through binoculars, and the tundra is viewed both up close and from a plane window.

This collection is also an evocative snapshot of American girlhood in the late '80s and early '90s. A shopping mall with an ice rink opens, Sassy magazine comes in the mail, bedroom closets become shrines covered in photos of teen heartthrobs, and bangs are teased high. Boys make insensitive comments. Still, the particularities of geography persist: A teacher warns her students that “the earth / could open and take anything away.” The speaker of one poem wins a trophy for an essay on the subject "What Petroleum Means to Me," presented by a group of women she derisively calls the "Petroleum Wives."

Oil Courses speaks to our collective reliance on exploitative industries and questions our responsibilities and relationships to the natural world. These poems are droll, revealing, and ultimately haunting.