Description
On the surface of a mine, overburden is the excess landscapesoil, stone, rootsexcavated and pushed aside to get to the valuable material below. But what accumulates when we displace and disrupt? Inside the language of extraction, what can we undercover in that overlooked excess?
Jolene Brinks Overburden excavates these questions. Across four sweeping sections, the collection probes what we disturb in our relentless digging, whether naming the stars, mining the past, or giving birth in an uncertain century. The excess of overburden becomes a luminous site of wonder, grief, and reckoning.
When such a dig is done, overburden is used to fill the seam left behind, an attempt to reclaim the land without fully acknowledging what was taken. Brinks poems inhabit this uneasy process of restorationintimate, global, planetary. They speak from clear-cuts and gravel pits, pandemic nurseries and glacial seams, gathering the personal and the historical into a layered archive of presence and loss.
With precision and tenderness, Brink documents and elegizes the aftermath of extraction, the compulsion to put something back. Overburden is a record of those attempts, a powerful meditation on inheritance, labor, motherhood, and the reverberations of human impact on both land and self.
Author: Jolene Brink
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Published: 02/12/2026
Series: Walt McDonald First-Book Poetry
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.36lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.28d
ISBN: 9781682833025
Language: English
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