Maurice Manning
To call Mark Nowak’s haunting new book a collection of poetry would be a bit of a misnomer. It would also be misleading to say Nowak is its author. The poems in Coal Mountain Elementary comprise three strands of found text; Nowak has selected and braided them, achieving an arresting effect. This is a book that exposes the darkest reaches of the global coal industry by using the industry’s own means—politely referred to as “extraction”—to lay bare the official language used to obfuscate mining’s human and environmental impact and to recover the far truer language of miners themselves. One of the biographer’s tasks is to explain why their chosen subject is important to the scope and shape of history and, further, to argue that that person remains significant in the present age. Robert Morgan’s Boone succeeds admirably on both counts. Morgan’s skills as a novelist and poet help in making this the most detailed and compelling life of Daniel Boone to date—Morgan is partial to dramatic imagery and sensual turns of phrase, for instance—but beyond telling the tale and getting the facts right with fastidious precision, this is a work of genuine scholarship, which interprets the frontiersman as