Earth and Below

5/5 ( ratings)

Earth and Below is an illustrated story based upon a history of copper mining, along with discursive riffs on the nature of the element. It is, in a sense, everything one ever wanted to know about copper. The subject matter is organized by Struggles, Theories, and Materials. Struggles most directly addresses the labor issues involved in the history of attempts to organize copper workers and their working conditions, but includes other themes of struggle as well. Theories contains work that explores how differing outlooks, most commonly class-based, but not exclusively so, impacted upon the lives of copper workers. Lastly, Materials looks at copper and copper mines as objects in a larger world. Archival photographs are included.

This is a harrowing, intense book. It carries on the great work and vision of Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead on a global scale. Poet and sociologist Susana H. Case has written a deeply moving “elegy of loss” and a sustained indictment of the copper mining industry from Chile to Calumet, Rhodesia to Boston. Her prose poems and selection of photographs give voice to human suffering in unforgettable ways, as if etched in acid on a copper plate. It takes courage just to read this book. --Anthony DiMatteo

At a time when the fundamental rights of workers are in peril, Susana H. Case's unflinching Earth and Below investigates the rarely seen lives of those who mine the earth at great personal risk and compels us to look anew at the goods "unearthed" from their work. Although Case employs a wide range of voices, time periods, and locales, her focus is on the individual, the family, and the community navigating the brutal challenges of the mining companies and on the earth itself. The overall effect is both panoramic and yet always intimate. Graced throughout by striking archival photographs, this extraordinary excavation into the world beneath is at once timely and timeless. --Yermiyahu Ahron Taub