Heidi Czerwiec, “Sweet/Crude: A Bakken Boom Cycle” (Gazing Grain Press, 2016)

With a genre-bending hybridity that Czerwiec is well-known for, Sweet/Crude: A Bakken Boom Cycle (Gazing Grain Press, 2016) takes the structure of a heroic crown of sonnets and retrofits it for the prose poem and lyric essay. The repetition throughout entrances the reader into the dream state of industrial dystopia that one might find Orwellian but Czerwiec knew as home.

The question and answer format is more of a call and response where the speaker ushers you through the duality of truth: what I see is different from what you see, but what lies beneath us is the same. What and who do we level in the wake of our greed?

Start reading it for the pleasure of the form, but keep reading it because this is a piece of our history as a nation and society that needs to be held in the tight home of lyric.

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