A Year of Misreading the Wildcats - Paperback

by Orchid Tierney (Author)

"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 natures that coagulate' at the watery peripheries of northeastern U.S. cities like Philadelphia, Camden, and Boston. What moves me most about these 'carbifereous lamentations of plastimodernity' is that Tierney's docunaut is no impartial archon, but rather a deeply intricated, implicated, and impassioned environmental advocate and cultural critic. Knowing that "the poetics I have imagined are not sustainable, not extreme enough to handle the carbon in the atmosphere or the plastic in the oceans, ' she asks the most difficult question facing us at this historical moment: what does it mean 'to know our extinction, and do it anyway'? In place of an answer, this book offers a stance, a way of relating to the great acceleration of waste with which we're all complicit: 'in such traces, I lung with ash, /ambulate with love and venom.'" --Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days

Excerpts / previous versions appear at Radioactive Moat and Pacifica Review:

wildcat: a boring, an aperture, an exploratory well.
'a year of misreading the wildcats' unravels a sprawling, year-long encounter with petroleum that began with a strip of plastic, caught between the branches of a maidenhair tree. This hybrid collection of poetry, prose and Polaroid photography drills the archive for film scores, fiction, and scholarship to recover the intertextual saturations of plastic and plankton, oil and oceans. Toggling between phantom islands and garbage gyres, the Pacific and Pennsylvania, a year of misreading the wildcats documents the impossible project of both environmental literature and photography to critique and catalogue disaster. This collection is a refusal for a narrative, where climate change denies the islands' one.