Pitchblende [Paperback]

Delivers an urgent poetics of resistance and appeal for environmental justice for a Saskatchewan community

We began to dig ourselves

deeper than we dreamed
when we began to see

metal as other than medicine,
our bodies, more than mineral.

At Rabbit Lake in northern Saskatchewan lies the second largest uranium mine in the western world. For decades, uranium ore and its poisonous by-productspitchblende, a highly radioactive rockwere removed, transported and scattered across the land, forever altering the lives of plants, animals, and peoples who live there.

Elise Marcella GodfreysPitchblendeis a timely, polyvocal, exquisitely crafted poetic intervention into environmental ethics and extractive industries. Inspired by and adapted from testimonies given at the public hearings about the Rabbit Lake mine, Godfrey creates a parallel structure for the found textand the voicesto colonize. Interconnected, Godfreys poems are a chorus of Indigenous Elders and women protesting a destructive, unwanted mine in their community and a visual, literal representation of how industry, capitalism, and colonialism seek to erase these same people and their voices.

Pitchblendeis a powerful, political collection that challenges us to urgently rethink our responsibilities to the land, water, and air that sustains all species, and our responsibilities to one another.

Elise Marcella Godfrey’s poetry has appeared in literary journals such assubTerrain,Room,Prism, andGrain. She now lives with her family on the traditional and unceded land of the QayQayt First Nation. A timely, polyvocal, exquisitely crafted poetic intervention. A distilled act of witnessing, built from nearly forgotten testimonies. InPitchblende,Elise Marcella Godfreys experimentation with poetic form and multiples voices, archival and imagined, to address the fallout of uranium mining that ol