Back when Iron & Earth was first founded in 2016, climate organizer and poet Melanie Unrau was starting her PhD dissertation. She wanted to explore the history of oil worker poetry in Canada, to study the rich ways in which workers express their entanglement in an industry with a dangerous and destructive reputation.
In 2024, McGill Queen’s University Press published The Rough Poets, adapting Unrau’s dissertation to a general audience. In poetic, full-circle fashion, Unrau generously decided to donate her royalties from the book to Iron & Earth.
We met with Melanie to talk about The Rough Poets, as well as I’ll Get Right On It, a new poetry anthology compiled by the Land and Labour Poetry Collective, released late 2025.
I&E: Hi Melanie, right off the bat, I’d like to express my deepest gratitude on behalf of Iron & Earth for donating the proceeds from The Rough Poets to support the work we do. Before diving into the content of the book, can you tell us a bit about how this relationship came about and why you decided to support Iron & Earth?
Sure, so I started researching and writing about oil worker poetry when I was a PhD student at the University of Manitoba. This project started as my dissertation around 2016, 2017. So that would have been when Iron & Earth was really new, and it was also the time of the Green New Deal; that’s how many of us were talking about a just transition at that time.
I was kind of an outsider to oil work, wanting to learn more about oil work and workers’ engagement with the concept of a just transition. So Iron & Earth was a good resource for me. I attended some of your events over the past several years. And I just liked the work that you're doing. In my conclusion, I cite Stephen Buehler, who was involved with Iron & Earth at the time, and his writing about solidarity among working people. Being an outsider, I wanted to use any proceeds from the book to support workers in their efforts toward a just transition. So I thought Iron & Earth made a lot of sense for the royalties. And I noticed that Iron & Earth is really growing a lot, and I hope that it can just remain rooted in radical labor politics and the work of decolonization as being part of that.
The Rough Poets contains a fairly academic analysis of different collections of oil-worker poetry published over the decades and was itself published by McGill-Queens University Press. Is this work geared towards a mainly academic audience? Or who would you say is your intended audience with this work?
So I come at this work as a climate organizer and a poet, but also as a scholar of literature in Canada. The book started as a PhD dissertation, and that's really the only way I'm qualified to speak to this body of work. Like I said, I'm not an oil worker myself. So I think it's a way of honoring the work that these worker poets did by giving them scholarly attention. But I did also want to make it a book that would appeal to, you know, what in the book industry they call “general readers.” So I think an interested non-academic can read the book and get something out of it. That was sort of my goal with the revamp.
Getting into the contents of the book now, “petropoetics” is a word you frequently use, but I get the impression you’re not just talking about oil worker poetry when you say this. What then is petropoetics, from your perspective?
Yeah, so I didn't coin the term; I found some first uses around 2014, and it was used in a few different places. One of them is in relation to this book, The Petroleum Manga, which is an art project by Marina Zirko, and it’s really fun. Another is Judith Rauscher, who wrote a book chapter on Canadian petropoetics and was studying Matthew Henderson's The Lease and other poetry in Canada about oil and gas. The third place I found it is in Russian literature conversations. So it's not that it's my term, but I am sort of trying to make a case that we should use the term more often.
I'm interested in the Greek word “poesis” that is the root of this conversation, and it has to do with making and world making. So artists will talk about their poetics, which is sort of their approach to making, but also we could broaden that out to just kind of “world building” in general. We also might think of the bigger petro-fictions in our world, like oil companies researching climate change in the 70s and 80s and then subsequently producing disinformation about climate change. Or, you know, the pretext that we're hearing now for the invasion of Venezuela, that sound related to the ones about invading Iraq and other places, right?
I also want to just open it up and think a little bigger. So some questions we might ask about petro-poetics are like: “how have we made a world that is deeply dependent on and shaped by fossil fuels? How has it changed both the climate and our cultures and societies and families to have built a world around that? Who has profited and who has suffered because of that world-making project?” And I guess what I'm trying to point to is that oil workers have expert insider knowledge about petropoetics, because they have been intimately involved in that project, in a very material way that many of the rest of us are separated from.
They have this bodily knowledge around it that I think is really valuable and I want to talk more about, and, you know, fossil fuels are so entangled with what it even means to be human and to live in the world right now… The medications that I take have petroleum in them. And I ingest plastic along with my food and water. And, you know, this whole system is kind of all-encompassing, where we're using and ingesting the byproducts of the fossil fuel industry, because they're producing so much of it that they're trying to find places to put it and they're putting it into our bodies. It's super pervasive. I think we all have this relationship with fossil fuels that we have been kind of trained not to pay attention to, but it's so deeply entangled with our everyday lives and the way we experience the world.
The poetry collections you deal with here come from a variety of different and sometimes surprising perspectives. Can you tell us about some of the different voices we can read across these collections, and how you see them interacting and intersecting with each other?
I picked four to tell you about. I hope that's not too much.
Rig Talk by Peter Christensen (1981)
So the first book that I found that's a full poetry collection about oil work is called Rig Talk by Peter Christensen. And it was published in 1981. It's about Christensen's time in the 1970s working in the oil and gas industry as what back then I guess they called being an oil rigger. And it's also illustrated, which is kind of fascinating. So it has these accompanying drawings of workers and oil rigs, and they're all in pencil. I find the interaction of the drawings and the poems really challenging, actually.
So Christensen's poetry is kind of like cowboy style poetry. It's very sparse. It's very masculine, I would say. And it does what I think of as a kind of analysis, I guess I would say that all of these poets, as I've already kind of been suggesting, are kind of theorists or thinkers of their own working conditions, and also maybe this bigger condition of like, I don't know, petro-modernity, something like that. So, Christensen: the book is called Rig Talk, and I think he's doing this kind of analysis of something that we might call “rig talk” all the way through. So it's the way workers talk, it's power dynamics, we might call it toxic masculinity. It's a performance that Christensen analyzes as a strategy for keeping fear away in a dangerous industry. And then it also extends out to be an analysis of what the industry is doing to the land, to Indigenous communities, and to the workers themselves.
In one poem, he writes, “what I learned from working the rigs is that I am an expendable machine,” and I think that's a major theme in the book. Part of what I think is interesting about Rig Talk is that he shows that it's possible both to go along with something and to perform this kind of toxic masculinity, and to not fully believe in it or be on board with it. And at the same time, he's observing that doing that changes you. So there's this interchange between rig talk as just something you do, and something that affects you personally and changes who you are.
Contrary Infatuations by Dymphny Dronyk (2007)
Another book that I write about is Dymphny Dronyk's Contrary Infatuations, published in 2007. Dronyk is a mediator, and she did surface rights negotiations on behalf of the American energy regulator, and also wrote safety manuals. Something else that's interesting about Dymphny Dronyk is that she lived and worked in the oil patch, including living [almost] next door to Trickle Creek Farm, where Webo Ludwig was, and where there was sabotage of oil wells happening in the 1990s.
Dronyk writes this super plain poetry that I observe kind of looks like oil wells, it's these long, narrow poems that you have to dig into and read below the surface in an interesting interplay around oil work. And she also makes this theory of “contrary infatuation”, as she calls it, that has to do with loving something and being dependent on it, and also needing to get away from it, to break away from it, like an abusive relationship, which is part of the book. The sense that we need to break up with oil, and we don't know how to do it; we're so deeply entangled with it at the same time. She has this concept of what we don't say, and the fear of looking like a hypocrite or being exposed as being complicit that keeps workers silent on the contradictions and those contrary infatuations that happen in the industry and in the oil patch.
The Lease by Mathew Henderson (2012)
Mathew Henderson's book, The Lease, is the next one. It was published in 2012, and Henderson worked as a production tester in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and he writes this really beautiful lyric poetry. Many of the poems are what I would call Jack Pine sonnets, which is a Canadian version of the sonnet–lots of rhythm and not rhyming, but just that melodic aspect of poetry. At the same time, Henderson's poetry is really similar to Peter Christensen's in some ways, and deals with this dynamic of pretending to be tough, pretending to know what you're doing, but underneath it reveals all these doubts and fears and confusion that this young worker in the oil patch experiences.
So for Henderson, the central question is around the lease, and the question of who owns the land. The characters in this book are residents of the oil patch who live on leased land, so they have their ownership of the land undermined by the industry that comes onto their land and extracts oil and gas, and then they go onto other people's land and do the same thing. So there's this experience of dispossession that's unsettling, and it also makes him ask questions about Indigenous rights and sovereignty in the same place, which is super interesting.
Then there's also this question of what you sell to the industry as the worker, and what you have the right to hold back, what the company or the industry might take anyway, in the form of loss of life, loss of limbs. The workers in one poem have a conversation about what body part they would sell for an even million, as if they could choose which body part they might lose in an accident, right? So the lease is sort of exploring those questions.
Boom Time by Lindsay Bird (2019)
And then the final one I wanted to highlight is Lindsay Bird's book, Boom Time, which was published in 2019. Lindsay Bird lived and worked in an oil sands work camp in the early 2000s. If you've read Kate Beaton's Ducks, Lindsay's actually a character in Ducks. She was Kate Beaton's coworker and friend. And you can kind of read the poetry and the graphic novel together in really interesting ways. Like Beaton, Bird is writing from this perspective of looking back in the rearview mirror at a boom time, as she describes it, from bust time. So it has this interesting mood, where the woman working in this work camp is naive. She's totally awed by the scale of the mine. She's also bored, killing time in a place where there's not a lot to do. And she's also adapting to this sense of always being under threat, either from the men she lives and works with, or from the other dangers of that place. So there's this layer of irony on top of the poetry that I find really interesting.
It’s like looking at modern optimism in the rearview mirror. There's this scientific marvel or technological wonder of this massive mine, that has also now come to be seen as an environmental disaster. And she is in the middle of that, trying to represent both what it was like for her when she was younger, as well as this later perspective on it. So the workers in the poems are inflicting injury on each other and endangering each other. And they're also in these moments where she shifts scale depicted as like, being like ants in this huge scale mine. And I love the design of the cover. The boom time lettering, to me looks like a boot tread. And I see all these little tiny workers below and it lends this ominous feeling to the everyday lives that are depicted inside the work camp.
She has some lines in her opening poem, “We stumble off the bus in our new boots to see what eats grass and what eats us.” There's this sense that there are always some giants or monsters outside the frame, ready to eat the workers. And that lends itself to a class analysis and also environmental conversations about the oil sands.
In this work, you position the oil workers creating poetry as both complicit in the extraction economy and its associated harms, while also being unfairly blamed for these harms. This is a nuanced view that is often missing in conversations about oil workers. Can you elaborate a bit about your perspective on this?
I’m going to try. I find this really frustrating. So, you know, we live in a neoliberal economy that leaves big decisions about how our societies will function up to the market and up to a ruling class, what we might call the 1%, who run it. And despite that, we also have this dominant common sense idea that what really matters is our individual choices as consumers–that we should worry about our carbon footprints. Like I said, Dymphny Dronyk is concerned about not looking like hypocrites, not saying the wrong thing. And there's this taboo on criticizing anything that we're implicated in, and it turns out we're implicated in all of it because we are part of a globalized economy. Our retirement savings are all invested in all of these terrible industries that are causing so much harm. So it's this common sense that tells us that we should be silent, really, which I find so frustrating.
In reality, we have so few options in a petro-economy where we're trying to make a living and get to work and feed our families or heat our homes. It's in this context that I think that the oil lobby in particular has benefited from framing climate change as a black and white issue, or as a debate where they can claim that the only way to support workers is to support [oil companies], and that's so frustrating to me. Or that workers are on one side and environmentalists are on the other side of this debate. I think something that The Rough Poets shows is that oil workers care about the land and the environment, that they live on the land and are dependent on it like all the rest of us. They want good futures for their families and for themselves. So they're divided in their loyalty, despite the fact that they're constantly being enlisted as supporters of industry or as embodiments of what is the worst about fossil fuel capitalism, which also is unfair.
So I think all of these things are kind of distractions from being clear about who is ultimately responsible for this situation that we find ourselves in. You know, the companies, the billionaires, the industries and the fossil economy, like that's where we could point fingers instead of engaging in behaviors that divide working people against one another. So I think sort of, I kind of want to sidestep that in a way and say: can we just be on the side of justice, the earth, a livable future for ordinary people and just be in solidarity with one another instead of accepting the idea that we're at war with each other?
On that note, you say that “attending to the ravelling and unravelling of petropoetics is urgent work for everyone”. What do you mean by this and how can ordinary people undertake this work?
I think of oil workers as theorists for themselves, of this thing we might call petropoetics. And there's this big question for our time that might center around petropoetics that's something like: how can we disentangle ourselves from fossil fuels in a way that protects land and water and the rights and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples while shifting power from billionaires and oligarchs and toward working people and building a more just world?
So if we don't want to use the word petropoetics–and I don't think it's necessarily a useful word for organizing–but that's the question of our time. I think many of us are now coming to think of this moment as a poly-crisis, with all of these overlapping crises happening. There’s climate change, but we’re also trying to reckon with settler colonialism and Truth and Reconciliation while Indigenous rights and sovereignty continue to be threatened and undermined. And then we have migration partly because of climate change, and the undermining of migrant rights. And we're watching wars and genocides happening. And we have these crises of tariffs and affordability, and this overwhelm and distraction as AI is happening right now, too. So I really appreciate the organizing that happened in the fall that was started by the climate movement around this “Draw the Line” idea where we sort of all come together and try to come at this huge problem from whatever our angle is, but be in solidarity with one another.
So in terms of what ordinary people can do, I don't know what the answer is to actually get movement on these issues that are so all-encompassing and frustrating. But I think we all just need to get involved in ways that make sense for us, whether it's our labour union or migrant rights or Palestine solidarity, tenants rights, emergency preparedness for these climate disasters that are already happening, [etc]. I live in Manitoba. We just lived through a summer of wildfires and it was devastating. So just like, get involved somewhere and look for ways to build community and look out for one another.
And refuse to let our movements be pitted against each other.
You’re also a member of the Land and Labour Poetry Collective, who edited the recent anthology titled I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis, which came out in October of last year. Iron & Earth’s own Communities Director Ana Guerra Marin wrote an endorsement for the back cover. Can you tell us a bit more about this anthology project as well as the collective?
So the Land and Labor Poetry Collective is made up of Moni Brar, Jenna Butler, Samantha Jones, Jamie Paris, Kelly Shepherd, and me. We're all poets and writers and editors from the prairie and western provinces. But between us we also have experience working in farming, geology, climate science, project management, oil and gas, manual labor, and research and teaching. And we all gathered in the spring of 2024, inspired by the worker-poetry anthologies of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, edited by Tom Wayman, which were really cool anthologies in their own right. We wanted to do a new take on that and have it focus around climate as a defining thing in our moment. So we put out a call that spring for submissions, and we really wanted to hear from working people and new writers and underrepresented writers.
So we tried to get the call out beyond our usual literary networks and into labour and environmentalist networks, and just in our own communities. We ended up just putting posters up all over the place. It was interesting that the call sort of got concentrated down ultimately to this statement: “what's it like to do your job, paid or unpaid? To make a living or just to get by in our age of climate change and uncertainty.”
As a way to support new writers to contribute to the anthology, we ran a whole bunch of workshops in different communities, along with some collaborators who weren't part of the collective. We had a workshop that was geared toward migrant workers and students in Kingston that was led by some collaborators at the university there. So we ended up with just tons of beautiful, powerful submissions from all kinds of folks. Many of them were workshop participants. It's just such an honor to be able to publish those works and also to work with Roseway Publishing, which is an imprint of Fernwood who published the book. And if anyone's interested in the book, you can buy it at your local bookstore, or request it at your library. Also on the Fernwood or Roseway website, you can use the promo code LABOUR15 until the end of January for a 15% discount.
While The Rough Poets deals exclusively with oil-worker poetry, I’ll Get Right On It features poetry from workers across industries, mirroring the way in which the impacts of climate change have gone from a predicted “externality” of a single industry, to affecting workers of all industries in real time, structurally, culturally, economically and emotionally. Are there parallels between these works that can be used as lessons for fostering worker solidarity between industries?
My short answer is yes, absolutely. And I'll try to unpack it a little. I don't know if you've read Andreas Malm's book, Fossil Capital, but I guess I would say that climate change is an externality of global racial colonial capitalism and an economy that can only consume resources and emit CO2 so severely because it's powered by fossil fuels. So like, yes, the oil and gas industry is fueling it, but also it's so much bigger than that. And I think working people in all sectors and industries are linked in their dependence on that fossil economy, which also treats them as resources and harms them along with the rest of planetary life. So that is really what comes up in the anthology.
So we have contributions by oil workers for sure. We also have nurses, teachers, so many actually powerful poems by, for example, call center workers about the parallels of constantly putting people on hold and feeling that being put on hold is exactly the position that working people are put in at this moment. We're just told to hang on and wait in a crisis.
And then also we have elders, we have an early childhood educator poem, roofers, workers in the trades, auto workers, bakers, postal workers, and also community organizers, disability rights activists. It's just such a wide range of people who really do effectively, when you read all the poems together, articulate this kind of solidarity that I think is really important. So one takeaway is that we're all affected by climate change.
And then I thought I could read Ana Guerra Marin's great blurb as a great takeaway. She writes, “As we continue to work through never ending catastrophes, this book reminds us to pause, look at our colleagues and comrades and see that we're not alone. It shows us the beauty and the pain of the everyday and leaves us with the feeling that when we are together, we are truly powerful.” We're really grateful to Ana for the blurb, and again, Iron & Earth as a resource in helping us think through the analysis that the book does.
There’s also a line in the intro, written by Anjali Appadurai that goes like this: “The poet, even in the heart of struggle or of banality, connects us back to life — for in these conditions of scarcity we are hungry for life.” You obviously feel that art and poetry are very important in these times. What do you think the role of poetry is during times of crisis?
We're so grateful to Anjali who's formerly of the Climate Emergency Unit and also the Padma Center for Climate Justice for that beautiful foreword. And it's very poetic in itself. So I recommend reading that.
I think we turn to poetry in times of crisis. When we face loss, we read poems at funerals, but also in the face of the unspeakable. And when we want to articulate our hope and our dreams, we read poems at protests. I do think poetry has an important role to play in culture, and I guess that's why I continue to study it. It helps us to put our feelings and our unformed ideas into words. And that helps us build analysis and linkages that then we can act on. I think that's why we read poems at rallies. And I really believe in art and poetry as tools for solidarity and community in our moment of poly-crisis. I think Anjali quotes Audre Lorde, “Poetry is not a luxury.” And that sort of summarizes also how I feel about it.
It's an essential in many ways for helping us grapple with what we're living through and what we're going to do about it.