Endangered Hydrocarbons. Lesley Battler. Book Thug. Toronto. 2015.
Lesley Battler's absolutely incendiary Endangered Hydrocarbons continues Toronto's Book Thug's tradition of publishing the most cutting edge poetry in the country. This tome weighs in at 175 pages and it is one hell of a dirty dance. These poems are a scathing indictment of the policies, systems and practices that surround petrochemical production and usage.
Battler isn't just making up stuff, this is Joyce Cary Horse's Mouth stuff of the highest order. As Gulley Jimson said:
“Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.”
― Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth
These poems are collages made out of the misdirection and technospeak from the industry itself. Battler explains the text with this statement:
"All of the poems in this project are derived from texts generated in a multinational oil company. I spliced items such as wellbooks, mudlogs, geological prognoses, and meeting notes with a variety of found material, including histories and critical theoretical works, as well as travel, real estate, and home decor magazines - basically anything that crossed my path."
The following poem is an excerpt from the longer poem Pax McMurray.
the Edson wars
for centuries
Edson's conventional well culture
had bullied the intellectuals
at Fort Mac
of course
this meant war
knowing
they were outnumbered
the Murrians pioneered
supply-chain
logistics
burned coke
with quick & dirty electricity
met intensity targets
transported
entire work camps
by horse-drawn chariot
routing the Edsonites
who continued utilizing
slaves, suffering
endless LTIs
at the same time,
commodity prices
bottomed
stymied by diminishing
sweet gas returns, Edson
surrendered to the
Bitumenites
who released one
of the most important
documents in history
Pax McMurray 1964
the Pax relied
on bulk modules
a surplus of joules
& Alcogel 1 to fuel
the imperial army
upholding the victors'
moral claim to the Regional
Municipality of Wood Buffalo
Syncrude imposed a
provisional government
wrote off the decline rate
cut supply to debt-ridden
territories
thus
the gentle colony
of bitumen worshippers
became a modern client-based
project team
...
Because Today's book of poetry is an old fart and getting older our selection of works from Endangered Hydrocarbons does not include any of the more adventurous and experimental of Battler's texts. But I am here to tell you that you can be sure she is brilliantly convincing at every turn.
It's not just that Battler is turning OILWORLD upside down and sideways -- these are poems written by an effervescent neologism, a master of neolexia. If you don't believe me just ask William Gibson. Battler invents language we somehow already know. There is much marvelous fun buried at every turn in this new encyclopedic examination of the absurd, it is enthralling.
RADIANT DIACEL
Martin Luther and the birth of
Individual Reservoir Pressure
hollowed in autumn shadow
Luther pursues the hermeneutics
of pneumatic drills
i lost hold of the Methane
made of Him, Stockmaster
and Hangman over my
poor Soul
the young monk sobs over the antics
of apostolics at critical point on
the risk matrix
pontiffs siphon pipelines
fill their empty mitres
nuns run wireline
down saline caverns
archbishops cache gas
in lavish Vaticans
mud-filtrate desecrates
the Holy Writ
haunted by hydraulic pumps
caught in faulty logic, he
promises to rid the world of
Cathodic corruption
salvation is a gift of God's grace
music of the chemical
Eucharist is received
by tests alone
personal revelation
on the very day condensate gas
goes retrograde, God reveals
His Five-Year Plan
the Reservoir Fluid
Composition of Tool
1200 is tabulated
on Pages 6 & 7
early temperature
vs. pressure plots
Luther burns the bull allowing nuncios
to sell Unleaded at Stations of the Cross
writes 600 million cubic feet a day
a personal best
but i know You
can pressure even
the most heinous
eicosane into a
straight-chain
only You
my God
we can not exist
in two phases
must
choose
heavy oil or
natural gas
Marburg
Luther edits his viscosity
deposits the excess slurry
of his vocabulary
deviates from vertical wells
drilled by the Colloquy
dares test Ethyl Lead
declares it Unready
insists on the physical
wettability of the Holy Spirit
one must open
the perforation tunnel
in his heart to bathe
in Radial Flow
Wittenberg
flushed with success from first-run tests
Luther emulsifies 95 theses from his treatise
the Compositional Analysis and Transfer
of Bottomhole Samples
civil authority
can enact no law
against the Diacel
of the Christ who
liquefied for our sin
...
Books like Endangered Hydrocarbons are rare as hen's teeth, poetry books like Endangered Hydrocarbons are once in a lifetime explorations of where flame meets fuel and our collective responsibility for lighting the match.
Battler isn't just being a well-informed reporter, she's turning a world upside down by being an enemy submarine in their lexicon ocean of oil.
There is much to entertain and enthrall in Battler's opus, but sit somewhere safe when you read it, Battler is going to be fracking with your head. She is sending out information stylishly dazzled into poetry, it is under pressure and it is going to go in deep. You won't be the same afterwards. From now on you will aftertaste kerosene.
ADVANCES IN UNCONVENTIONAL ONEIROLOGY
at 25 barrels per capita
(60 barrels Alberta)
Canadians are the world's
heaviest dream users
my subconscious contains
a semantic core encased
in mundane sand, sulphur
salt water
heat, pressure, decay
eventually compress
past and present into
a tarry ooze
early oneirologists ran
small diameter pipes
through my limbic
system
flared off random
thought mutations
until my amygdala
blew out on Seepage
Lake
for weeks, phantasms
and psychoses clogged
the Old Man River
terrorizing Lethbridge
finally in '55 the great
Conrad Schlumberger
analyzed a lump of my
reverie and just knew
dimethyltriptamine
could increase dream
production 60%
Imperial Oil approved
gravimetric testing on
my hippocampus
cholinergic ponto-genicul-
occipital waves stimulated
my cortical structures
technicians injected
nitroglycerine into my
parietal lobe
shot-point vibrations
released dissociated
imagination from
sensory traps
REM converters allowed
thousands of metres of
uncaptured by-products
to push up the standpipe
rendering a whole new
source of my dreams
(whimsy, hypnagogia)
safe for your factory
your car, your furnace
...
This book is an indictment. A stunning first book. Lesley Battler has our full attention.
Lesley Battler
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Barrie, Ontario, Lesley Battler’s work has been published in Alberta Views, Arc, Contemporary Verse 2, dandelion, filling Station, Matrix, Other Voices, PRISM international, and west coast line. She won the PRISM international Earle Birney Award (2012), and the University of Calgary Poem of the Season Award (2009) for a poem that became part of Endangered Hydrocarbons. Battler received an MA in English from Concordia University, and currently lives in Calgary, where until recently she worked in the petrochemical industry.BLURBS
“Electric and unexpected … Lesley Battler’s ‘Idylls of Inuvik’ [is] a zinger of a poem that uses the internal, molecular energy of words to enact a merciless takedown of the still-colonial attitudes at play in the economics of Canada’s North.”
— Anita Lahey, Arc Poetry Magazine
“Lesley Battler’s cut-up work will continue to remind me that it will always be easier to remove overburden than it will be to clear-cut a small forest. Her work brings us the spectacle of the wars of rhetoric – with their victors and victims of ideology, hijacking knowledge and power with approved terms of vocabulary.”
“Lesley Battler’s cut-up work will continue to remind me that it will always be easier to remove overburden than it will be to clear-cut a small forest. Her work brings us the spectacle of the wars of rhetoric – with their victors and victims of ideology, hijacking knowledge and power with approved terms of vocabulary.”
— Paul Zits, filling Station
Lesley Battler
Reading from Endangered Hydrocarbons at the 2015 BookThug Spring Launch
video: Jay MillAr
394
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