A review of Lesley Battler\u27s Endangered Hydrocarbons

Sloane, Michael D

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 14No. 2 Tenth Anniversary Issue Article 12-29-2016Endangered Hydrocarbons by Lesley BattlerMichael D. SloaneFanshawe CollegePart of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North AmericaCommons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeSloane, Michael D.. "Endangered Hydrocarbons by Lesley Battler." The Goose, vol. 14 , no. 2 , article 1, 2016,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss2/1.Petropoetics  Endangered Hydrocarbons by LESLEY BATTLER  BookThug, 2015 $18.00  Reviewed by MICHAEL D. SLOANE  A cut-up collage for the 21st century, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons is required reading in a time of global warming and serious climate change. With each and every poem “derived from texts generated in a multinational oil company” (173), Battler makes the personal lyric not only political, but also environmental. Splicing together wellbooks, mudlogs, geological prognoses, meeting notes, histories, critical theoretical works, video games, and travel, real estate, and home décor magazines, Endangered Hydrocarbons is an intertextual ecosystem organized into six parts: “Emergence,” “Frontier Exploration and Production,” “Manuscript Extraction,” “Under Attack,” “The Justice League of Global Oil,” and “Panacea.” Each section is teeming with poetic energy, which is perhaps one of the reasons why the poet reminds us that “art is work” (96). This reminder also refers us to real world resources, which fuel and form Endangered Hydrocarbons itself. Without a doubt, Battler’s collection of poetry is a provocative, playful, and pitch-perfect debut made up of fragments from our petroculture.  From the get-go, Endangered Hydrocarbons provokes the reader with its title, which creates a frame of fragility around the use of non-renewable resources while implicitly calling out producers and consumers bound to the oil industry in one way or another. Smartly drawing on the rhetoric around threatened animal species and evoking extinction as such, the title creates a sense of sympathy for the poetically enlivened chemicals most often found in crude oil. Paradoxically worried for what we are doing to the oily other, Battler’s title establishes a fundamental tension that exists today, one that is all too real when world leaders guzzle gas to fly to Paris to talk about climate change. In “Protocols of Global Oil,” moreover, a modified version of Battler’s title appears as one for the subsection of the poem: “action items to preserve / endangered Canadian / hydrocarbons.” After this title, the poem gestures to that which is threatening Canadian hydrocarbons—namely, our acquiescence when it comes to corporations plundering the Athabasca oil sands:  Canada must take  ownership of her homegrown terror  silence species  dissidence   increase speed and frequency  of manifestos[.] (131-132)  The speaker uses the topical rhetoric of terrorism to incite the “silence species” to fully acknowledge an environmental injustice and, in turn, speak up through dissenting “manifestos.” In encouraging one to rethink and rebel, Endangered Hydrocarbons also formally provokes us by disrupting reading conventions in the poem “Peak Oil Exile,” which looks both backward to “the Dark Age” (101) and forward to “the bitumen pools of YouTube” (102) while including a marginalized, vertical line of verse severed to no end: “Th / e / yea / r / 19 / 80 / see / ms / a / lon / g / tim / e / ago 1Sloane: Endangered HydrocarbonsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016/ . / I / wa / s / wr / estl / ing / wit / h / the / per / son / al / bac / kgr / ou / nd / of / ins / titu / tio / nal / ize / d / rac / is / m / an / d / en / de / mi / c / vio / len / ce. / As / to / inj / ust / ice” (101-102). The excessive line segmentation is not only an aesthetic shock, but also a reflection of the speaker’s traumatic experiences. Without an end stop, moreover, the lines suggest that “inj / ust / ice” is ongoing, especially in the context of environmental degradation through the consumption of hydrocarbons. The poem ends with a nostalgic desire for utopic ignorance and bliss: “even now I still dream of the days when i believed we / would deliver every one of us to a land untouched / by Peak Oil theories” (102). This idealism underscores the severity of our current ecological crisis. Battler offers more than just doom and gloom, however.  Endangered Hydrocarbons is seriously playful. In a section from “Unearthed” called “armistice,” the speaker revisits a previous relationship thanks to Facebook. Thirteen years after a “fatal split,” the speaker is surprised to find his or her former partner “scaling my Wall of Evil. lol" (15). The poem’s self-reflexive speaker uses Internet slang to out the jokey reference to Facebook. Today, this level of awareness is the norm; however, the poem surprises us when it transforms into a Facebook post that is left unseen except by us: “this post has been / removed or could / not be loaded” (15). While the poem plays with the personal, it also reveals an oil industry that can facilitate mending missed connections: “why not visit me / in Calgary. we'll / touch base // i can expense / your airfare” (16). Natural resources resound in the background.  There are a number of other playful poems throughout Endangered Hydrocarbons like “Offshore Décor,” a mock magazine reporting on things like how “fusion is in” (51) or how to “dress your subsea / Christmas tree / in cool fossils” (53); “Creative Reservoir Workshop,” a poetic translation of a PowerPoint presentation promoting ways to “boost your / payload 1,000 to 10,000 syllables / a page” (73);  “The Leduc Award of Excellence,” a paneled conversation evaluating oil companies’ authored novels titled after petrochemicals; “Doing Business with Poets,” a series of guidelines for poetry readings by oil tycoons replete with comical, yet twisted references like “children hidden / in Oulippan labs” (143) or “a thousand / rimbauds / a day” (145); and “Tender Carbon,” a Steinian homage to Stein’s Tender Buttons, a modernist writer well versed with the lifeblood of her Ford Model T, “Aunt Pauline.” Battler’s “aleatory play” (96) is pointed at a world that does not fully see how it is driven by petroculture, and so we hear this critique in the sonic nature of Endangered Hydrocarbons, too.  Battler’s sounds are loud and lovely. In “The Petrochemical Ball,” the poet holds a microphone up to often unheard things like the sound of liquefied “pentanes” (C5H12), or organic alkanes with carbon: “SHIRRRK-ka pk / SHIIIIIIRK-SH-ka / pok-shh kapoke-e’ / eee’ EEE” (57). Or “QUEEEE-/AWNX,” which is a “sonic / anomaly” of “ozone / throat / music” (57). This is just the tip of the melting iceberg, however. Endangered Hydrocarbons is brimming with uncommon words that not only drive the reader to the dictionary, but also appeal to the listener’s “acoustic receivers” (74) and reveal a novel lexical soundscape: “SurgiFrac” (18), “toluene” (28), “geocline” (29), “diorite” (34), “batholith” (34), “phalaropes” (47), and “aniline-tinis” (59). Moreover, using her “phrase tasers” (143), 2The Goose, Vol. 14, No. 2 [2016], Art. 1https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss2/1Battler’s words work wonders on us both melodically and rhythmically. For instance, the “assonance madness” (96) appears in “Liquefied Natural Gas: The Jungian Interpretation” in these lines: “in an act of early / synchronicity / dionysiacs crack / childproof caps / off cryogenic vials” (62). Elsewhere, in “Hydrocarbons on the Eve of Revolution,” we hear lines like “sip a tubular double-double tread gas pedal” or “pop fault traps grope sealing cap slurp hope” (119). Here, Battler’s Dadaist tongue twisters foreground sounds that are symptoms of a hurried hyper-capitalism gutting and draining the Earth of its resources.  While we are listening to a line like “the hermeneutics / of pneumatic drills” (67), or any other one in Endangered Hydrocarbons for that matter, we might start to hear and better understand the nature of our petroculture today. Defamiliarizing business as usual, Battler’s much needed debut playfully pushes us to see the bigger picture in and through the micropolitics and environs of the poem.   MICHAEL D. SLOANE, of London, Ontario, is a professor at Fanshawe College. His work focuses on ecological objects in American modernist poetry. Having published on the poetics of contemporary waste, he is now working on several forthcoming edited book chapters for New Perspectives on Veganism, Modernism and the Anthropocene, and Modernism in the Green. His poetry has appeared in The Goose.    3Sloane: Endangered HydrocarbonsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016

Endangered Hydrocarbons by Lesley Battler

Scholars Commons

The Goose
Volume 14
No. 2 Tenth Anniversary Issue Article 1
2-29-2016
Endangered Hydrocarbons by Lesley Battler
Michael D. Sloane
Fanshawe College
Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America
Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment Commons
Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose
This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an
authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante
de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez
scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée
Sloane, Michael D.. "Endangered Hydrocarbons by Lesley Battler." The Goose, vol. 14 , no. 2 , article 1, 2016,
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss2/1.
Petropoetics 
 
Endangered Hydrocarbons by LESLEY 
BATTLER  
BookThug, 2015 $18.00 
 
Reviewed by MICHAEL D. SLOANE 
 
A cut-up collage for the 21st century, 
Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons is 
required reading in a time of global 
warming and serious climate change. With 
each and every poem “derived from texts 
generated in a multinational oil company” 
(173), Battler makes the personal lyric not 
only political, but also environmental. 
Splicing together wellbooks, mudlogs, 
geological prognoses, meeting notes, 
histories, critical theoretical works, video 
games, and travel, real estate, and home 
décor magazines, Endangered 
Hydrocarbons is an intertextual ecosystem 
organized into six parts: “Emergence,” 
“Frontier Exploration and Production,” 
“Manuscript Extraction,” “Under Attack,” 
“The Justice League of Global Oil,” and 
“Panacea.” Each section is teeming with 
poetic energy, which is perhaps one of the 
reasons why the poet reminds us that “art is 
work” (96). This reminder also refers us to 
real world resources, which fuel and form 
Endangered Hydrocarbons itself. Without a 
doubt, Battler’s collection of poetry is a 
provocative, playful, and pitch-perfect 
debut made up of fragments from our 
petroculture.  
From the get-go, Endangered 
Hydrocarbons provokes the reader with its 
title, which creates a frame of fragility 
around the use of non-renewable resources 
while implicitly calling out producers and 
consumers bound to the oil industry in one 
way or another. Smartly drawing on the 
rhetoric around threatened animal species 
and evoking extinction as such, the title 
creates a sense of sympathy for the 
poetically enlivened chemicals most often 
found in crude oil. Paradoxically worried for 
what we are doing to the oily other, 
Battler’s title establishes a fundamental 
tension that exists today, one that is all too 
real when world leaders guzzle gas to fly to 
Paris to talk about climate change. In 
“Protocols of Global Oil,” moreover, a 
modified version of Battler’s title appears as 
one for the subsection of the poem: “action 
items to preserve / endangered Canadian / 
hydrocarbons.” After this title, the poem 
gestures to that which is threatening 
Canadian hydrocarbons—namely, our 
acquiescence when it comes to 
corporations plundering the Athabasca oil 
sands:  
Canada must take  
ownership of her 
homegrown terror 
 
silence species  
dissidence  
 
increase speed 
and frequency  
of manifestos[.] (131-132) 
 
The speaker uses the topical rhetoric of 
terrorism to incite the “silence species” to 
fully acknowledge an environmental 
injustice and, in turn, speak up through 
dissenting “manifestos.” In encouraging one 
to rethink and rebel, Endangered 
Hydrocarbons also formally provokes us by 
disrupting reading conventions in the poem 
“Peak Oil Exile,” which looks both backward 
to “the Dark Age” (101) and forward to “the 
bitumen pools of YouTube” (102) while 
including a marginalized, vertical line of 
verse severed to no end: “Th / e / yea / r / 
19 / 80 / see / ms / a / lon / g / tim / e / ago 
1
Sloane: Endangered Hydrocarbons
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016
/ . / I / wa / s / wr / estl / ing / wit / h / the / 
per / son / al / bac / kgr / ou / nd / of / ins / 
titu / tio / nal / ize / d / rac / is / m / an / d / 
en / de / mi / c / vio / len / ce. / As / to / inj 
/ ust / ice” (101-102). The excessive line 
segmentation is not only an aesthetic shock, 
but also a reflection of the speaker’s 
traumatic experiences. Without an end 
stop, moreover, the lines suggest that “inj / 
ust / ice” is ongoing, especially in the 
context of environmental degradation 
through the consumption of hydrocarbons. 
The poem ends with a nostalgic desire for 
utopic ignorance and bliss: “even now I still 
dream of the days when i believed we / 
would deliver every one of us to a land 
untouched / by Peak Oil theories” (102). 
This idealism underscores the severity of 
our current ecological crisis. Battler offers 
more than just doom and gloom, however.  
Endangered Hydrocarbons is 
seriously playful. In a section from 
“Unearthed” called “armistice,” the speaker 
revisits a previous relationship thanks to 
Facebook. Thirteen years after a “fatal 
split,” the speaker is surprised to find his or 
her former partner “scaling my Wall of Evil. 
lol" (15). The poem’s self-reflexive speaker 
uses Internet slang to out the jokey 
reference to Facebook. Today, this level of 
awareness is the norm; however, the poem 
surprises us when it transforms into a 
Facebook post that is left unseen except by 
us: “this post has been / removed or could / 
not be loaded” (15). While the poem plays 
with the personal, it also reveals an oil 
industry that can facilitate mending missed 
connections: “why not visit me / in Calgary. 
we'll / touch base // i can expense / your 
airfare” (16). Natural resources resound in 
the background.  
There are a number of other playful 
poems throughout Endangered 
Hydrocarbons like “Offshore Décor,” a mock 
magazine reporting on things like how 
“fusion is in” (51) or how to “dress your 
subsea / Christmas tree / in cool fossils” 
(53); “Creative Reservoir Workshop,” a 
poetic translation of a PowerPoint 
presentation promoting ways to “boost 
your / payload 1,000 to 10,000 syllables / a 
page” (73);  “The Leduc Award of 
Excellence,” a paneled conversation 
evaluating oil companies’ authored novels 
titled after petrochemicals; “Doing Business 
with Poets,” a series of guidelines for poetry 
readings by oil tycoons replete with 
comical, yet twisted references like 
“children hidden / in Oulippan labs” (143) or 
“a thousand / rimbauds / a day” (145); and 
“Tender Carbon,” a Steinian homage to 
Stein’s Tender Buttons, a modernist writer 
well versed with the lifeblood of her Ford 
Model T, “Aunt Pauline.” Battler’s “aleatory 
play” (96) is pointed at a world that does 
not fully see how it is driven by 
petroculture, and so we hear this critique in 
the sonic nature of Endangered 
Hydrocarbons, too.  
Battler’s sounds are loud and lovely. 
In “The Petrochemical Ball,” the poet holds 
a microphone up to often unheard things 
like the sound of liquefied “pentanes” 
(C5H12), or organic alkanes with carbon: 
“SHIRRRK-ka pk / SHIIIIIIRK-SH-ka / pok-shh 
kapoke-e’ / eee’ EEE” (57). Or “QUEEEE-
/AWNX,” which is a “sonic / anomaly” of 
“ozone / throat / music” (57). This is just the 
tip of the melting iceberg, however. 
Endangered Hydrocarbons is brimming with 
uncommon words that not only drive the 
reader to the dictionary, but also appeal to 
the listener’s “acoustic receivers” (74) and 
reveal a novel lexical soundscape: 
“SurgiFrac” (18), “toluene” (28), “geocline” 
(29), “diorite” (34), “batholith” (34), 
“phalaropes” (47), and “aniline-tinis” (59). 
Moreover, using her “phrase tasers” (143), 
2
The Goose, Vol. 14, No. 2 [2016], Art. 1
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss2/1
Battler’s words work wonders on us both 
melodically and rhythmically. For instance, 
the “assonance madness” (96) appears in 
“Liquefied Natural Gas: The Jungian 
Interpretation” in these lines: “in an act of 
early / synchronicity / dionysiacs crack / 
childproof caps / off cryogenic vials” (62). 
Elsewhere, in “Hydrocarbons on the Eve of 
Revolution,” we hear lines like “sip a tubular 
double-double tread gas pedal” or “pop 
fault traps grope sealing cap slurp hope” 
(119). Here, Battler’s Dadaist tongue 
twisters foreground sounds that are 
symptoms of a hurried hyper-capitalism 
gutting and draining the Earth of its 
resources.  
While we are listening to a line like 
“the hermeneutics / of pneumatic drills” 
(67), or any other one in Endangered 
Hydrocarbons for that matter, we might 
start to hear and better understand the 
nature of our petroculture today. 
Defamiliarizing business as usual, Battler’s 
much needed debut playfully pushes us to 
see the bigger picture in and through the 
micropolitics and environs of the poem.  
 
MICHAEL D. SLOANE, of London, Ontario, is 
a professor at Fanshawe College. His work 
focuses on ecological objects in American 
modernist poetry. Having published on the 
poetics of contemporary waste, he is now 
working on several forthcoming edited book 
chapters for New Perspectives on Veganism, 
Modernism and the Anthropocene, and 
Modernism in the Green. His poetry has 
appeared in The Goose. 
 
  
3
Sloane: Endangered Hydrocarbons
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016


https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1166&amp;context=thegoose

Endangered Hydrocarbons by Lesley Battler

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