A poet and essayist explores the environmental "badlands" of Europe, Asia, and the U.S.
"A combination of Martin Amis-like hyperbolic prose and Bruce Chatwin-like wander-lust....An expansive map of the world's absurd zones". -- Kirkus Reviews
Welcome to Badlands. Welsh poet and essayist Robert Minhinnick has been a long-time environmental activist. In this book, his second collection of essays since the award-winning Watching the Fire Eater, he writes about his travels from the impoverishments of Albania to the scorched suburbia of Silicon Valley, by way of a foreign country called England, twenty thousand lakes, and a desert of dinosaur bones, from the Albertan Badlands of Canada to a British nuclear plant, to the coast of southern Wales, and the unending bus trips, hotels, and motels.
Industrial smoke turns the noon sky black; beneath its clouds the poorest people in Europe arrange flowers on a dictator's grave. At a nuclear power plant the only sound is the sighing of photocopiers; another party of visitors gets ready for a tour. In "Ripper Country", in Whitechapel, Minhinnick discovers a perverse form of commercial pollution, as "a poster extends an invitation to 'Join the Ripper Trail'".
Welcome to Badlands. Our guides are a survivor of Europe's most bizarre political regime; Mars Barlow, a poet who wishes to be abducted by aliens and who brings the author to a strange museum, a "dinosaur death camp", just outside the Hoodoo Motel; and the author himself, reluctant aide worker, the observing tourist with a computer tan, regretting his decision to call in at The Zoo for a quick one.
Industry Reviews
Welsh essayist-tourist Minhinnick travels selected irrational backwaters with a combination of Martin Amis-like hyperbolic prose and Bruce Chatwin-like wanderlust. Whether trucking relief supplies to post-Communist Albania, reconnoitering his native Wales, or aimlessly wandering California's schizoid landscape, Minhinnick is always on the watch for the incongruous juxtapositions of postmodern life, as well as for a striking simile. At home he turns up a prehistoric barrow, carefully posted by the English Heritage society, nearby a crop circle during the New Age hoax's epidemic; and he endures the media spectacle of watching the Welsh soccer team's match against post-Ceau??escu Romania for the World Cup qualifying finals. In the fruitfully weird USA, he finds an eccentric fellow traveler in "Mars" Barlow, an asthmatic, sugar-addicted college instructor who teaches "prairie children prairie literature" and shoplifts Heidegger and X-Files paperbacks. Minhinnick's trips on interstate bus rides and to dinosaur-fossil parks in the original badlands are accompanied by Mars's breathless rants on televised executions, UFOs, militias, and the word "vug" (a Cornish mining term). By himself in California, Minhinnick unearths such oddities as a jogger killed by a mountain lion attracted by her musk perfume and recycling fanatic Frank Schiavo's legal battles to exempt himself from garbage taxes. Sometimes Minhinnick's entertaining, high-altitude flights of rhetoric overshoot the ground he's trying to cover, such as the current state of England or an array of travel vignettes. Just as often, though, these ironic, impressionistic essays spread out an expansive map of the world's absurd zones; the most notable are his experiences in Albania, where the children are no longer named after dictator Enver Hoxha bat after Elvis and Clinton instead. Not quite crazy enough for true gonzo writing. Minhinnick nonetheless turns up enough fear and loathing during his global road trips. (Kirkus Reviews)
