Coal Mountain Elementary

A singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America’s most innovative political poets, Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, West Virginia miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren, newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China, and full-color photographs of Chinese miners by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh.

A poet and labor activist heralded by Adrienne Rich for “regenerating the rich tradition of worki...