Goose

Hand-traced poems that enact literary criticism atop historical writings of father of the tar sands S. C. Ells. Goose is a collection of hand-traced visual poems made using found text and images from the 1938 and 1956 editions of Northland Trails, a book of self-illustrated short stories, poems, and essays about the Athabasca region by father of the tar sands S. C. Ells (18781971). Goose takes Ellss early work surveying, mining, and separating bituminous sand, along with his colonial, racist, and sexist attitudes and aesthetics, as the starting point for an inventive and biting critique of the oil-sands industry and our petromodern energy system. Inverting found-poetry erasure and procedural techniques to explore themes of extraction, the trace, and the relationship between humans, nonhumans, and the land, Goose enacts irreverent, deconstructive literary criticism. At turns cheeky, sharp-witted, and grave, Unrau's poems retrace Ellss steps, pen strokes, and conscious and unconscious lines of thought and flight to write a new history of the oil sands.