September 2026
82 pp., 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paperback, $18.95
ISBN 978-1-60635-511-4
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Oil Courses
Forthcoming, Poetry, Wick First BookCarolyn Williams-Noren
In these poems, the absurd, the beautiful, and the alarming collide. Tiny fish begin to swim sideways, poisoned. The permafrost melts. Whales are hunted and skinned. The high school yearbook features students who have hit moose with their cars. A polar bear is spotted at a distance through binoculars, and the tundra is viewed both up close and from a plane window.
This collection is also an evocative snapshot of American girlhood in the late ’80s and early ’90s. A shopping mall with an ice rink opens, Sassy magazine comes in the mail, bedroom closets become shrines covered in photos of teen heartthrobs, and bangs are teased high. Boys make insensitive comments. Still, the particularities of geography persist: A teacher warns her students that “the earth / could open and take anything away.” The speaker of one poem wins a trophy for an essay on the subject “What Petroleum Means to Me,” presented by a group of women she derisively calls the “Petroleum Wives.”
Oil Courses speaks to our collective reliance on exploitative industries and questions our responsibilities and relationships to the natural world. These poems are droll, revealing, and ultimately haunting.
Carolyn Williams-Noren has published two poetry chapbooks, and her work has been in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Willow Springs, and many other journals. She’s earned Pushcart nominations and a Best American Essays notables mention, plus support from the McKnight Foundation, among other honors. See more at williams-noren.com.
“Oil Courses is learned in loving ways. Its wisdom arrives from multiple disciplines and spans across generations. Each poem is sourced by Carolyn Williams-Noren’s resilient curiosity and the kind of attention that can only result from deep yearning—for knowledge, for understanding, for different, for better. That same desire is evident in the care Williams-Noren takes to convey what she has come to understand from a lifetime of studious inquiry. On every page, Oil Courses engages and entertains; it’s a dazzling and memorable debut.”—Michael Kleber-Diggs, author of Worldly Things
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“‘How many steps between your family and an oil well?’ This is a question asked by Carolyn Williams-Noren in the plainly spoken yet deeply complicated Oil Courses. Her own answer is one she’s struggled with, especially as her father ‘earned a living’ in the drilling industry and with her own experience as a young person at Endicott, an entirely human-made island of 45 acres built for offshore oil production. Yet each of these carefully wrought poems offers an answer, not only exploring the ethics of her own complicity but also demonstrating just how we’re all tangled into petroleum’s sticky web of exploitation. Painfully reckoning with our whale-slaughtering past as well as with an uncertain future in which so much of the weather was once simply taken for granted as ‘ordinary,’ these poems don’t simply emote—they make a careful and measured study to gain perspective. Showing just how the word hypocrite is ‘always ready to burn the veins,’ this steadfast debut doesn’t offer solutions, no. It does something quite important during this time of climate crisis: it complicates—and humanizes—the question of how we got here in the first place.”—Nickole Brown, author of To Those Who Were Our First Gods and The Donkey Elegies
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