Whale

When the black spine broke / the surface / a rift opened in the world.From the oil that fuelled the Industrial Revolution to the whalebone that shaped fashionable silhouettes, the whaling industry was deeply entwined with the rise of empire. Adam Beardsworth’s new collection, Whale, is both elegy and protest – a haunting reckoning with the political and economic forces that, for centuries, sacrificed whales in the name of human progress.Through mythic, cultural, ecological, and psychological lenses, Whale explores the history of the whaling industry, meditating on the legacies of unsustainable – and often tragic – human interventions in the natural world. Anchored by a sequence of ten “Whaling Diary” poems that imagine whaling through the eyes of a nineteenth-century sailor, the collection traces how human civilization has profited at the expense of non-human others, with poems that reflect on products rendered from whales – from corsets, piano keys, and ink to artillery and weapons of mass destruction; poems that explore the link between ecological guilt and mental illness; poems that position the pursuit of whale oil as a precursor to our dependence on fossil fuels; and poems that seek hope and renewal in the beauty and mystery of the cetacean world.Whale asks us to listen differently – to the lives around us, to the wounds we have inflicted, and to the possibility that wonder itself might be a beginning.