Lines the Quarry

Through exploring various disasters, Clarke ends up exploring memory—“the worst disaster since the last one”—writing about people lost through the prison system, disasters man-made we don’t wish to think about, and just where the accumulation of disaster upon disaster might end up taking us. “What do you love about this / world? Without what is there nothing // else to say?”—rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog Lines the Quarry writes of and into that ongoing disaster and possibility, interjecting into the commercial language of success the many violations—bodily and otherwise—that define capitalist exploitation. Within a span of 15 days, Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch coal mine exploded, killing 29 miners, and BP’s Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing 11 workers and leaking over 5 million barrels of oil (and counting). A year and a half later, Occupy occurred. Lines the Quarry writes of and into that ongoing disaster and possibility, interjecting into the commercial language of success the many violations—bodily and otherwise—that define capitalist exploitation. Weaving together autobiography, lies, half-truths, corporate horror stories and labor’s radical past, this book seeks to articulate both our devastation and our possibility in very human terms. In a language familiar yet strange, composed of fragments, multiple speech registers and broken syntactical arrangements, the book examines lives lived through very difficult circumstances and the corporate forces that range upon our earth.