Earth and Below

An illustrated story, in a sense, everything one ever wanted to know about copper, examining the labor issues involved in the history of attempts to organize copper workers, their working conditions, the way differing outlooks, most commonly class-based, but not exclusively so, impacted upon the lives of copper workers, and copper and copper mines as objects in a larger world. 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 DiMatteoAt 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 TaubSusana H. Case, a professor at the New York Institute of Technology, has published The Scottish Café (Slapering Hol Press), Anthropologist In Ohio (Main Street Rag Publishing Company), The Cost Of Heat (Pecan Grove Press), Manual of Practical Sexual Advice (Kattywompus Press), and Salem In Séance (WordTech Editions). Please visit her online at: http: //iris.nyit.edu/ shcase/.