The Book of the Dead [Paperback]

Written in response to the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia,The Book of the Deadis an important part of West Virginia’s cultural heritage and a powerful account of one of the worst industrial catastrophes in American history. The poems collected here investigate the roots of a tragedy that killed hundreds of workers, most of them African American. They are a rare engagement with the overlap between race and environment in Appalachia.
Published for the first time alongside photographs by Nancy Naumburg, who accompanied Rukeyser to Gauley Bridge in 1936, this edition ofThe Book of the Deadincludes an introduction by Catherine Venable Moore, whose writing on the topic has been anthologized inBest American Essays.
 

 

“If Rukeyser had left us onlyThe Book of the DeadandThe Life of Poetry, she would have made a remarkable contribution to American literature. But the range and daring of her work, its generosity of vision, its formal innovations, and its level of energy are unequalled among twentieth-century American poets.”
—Adrienne Rich, introduction toMuriel Rukeyser, Selected Poems
 

“Muriel Rukeyser’s words are a painful, haunting memorial to an American crime. Catherine Venable Moore’s graceful essay sets the work in its time and place, and ties it to today’s struggles.”
—Jedediah Purdy, author of After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) was a prolific American writer and political activist. In 1935 her first collection of poetry,Theory of Flight, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and she went on to publish twelve more volumes of poetry. She received a National Inló#