Poems by Mark Nowak
photographs by Ian Teh and Mark Nowak
“Coal Mountain Elementary is an imaginative and shocking reminder of what it means, in the most human and poignant terms, to be a miner, whether in this country or in China, or for that matter anywhere in the industrial world. It is also a tribute to miners and working people everywhere. It manages, in photos and in words, to portray an entire culture. And it is a stunning educational tool.”—Howard Zinn
“Mark Nowak’s vital poetry cleaves to the hard surfaces of working lives. There is an epic quality to the voices that cannot be dismissed by corporations or the state. Coal Mountain Elementary will move readers to indignation and action.”—Aihwa Ong
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, and newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China with photographs of Chinese miners taken by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh.
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