Fast Commute

Apowerful book-length poem on environmental destruction and the violences of colonial nation-states from the acclaimed author of Settler Education.

Fast Commute is a book-length poem that exposes the links between environmental destruction, unfettered capitalism, and white supremacy. This poem sings lament for places in flux, where industrial, commercial, or suburban development encroaches or invades. From the 401 to Refinery Row east of Edmonton, from Lake Ontario to the Fraser River, Fast Commute points to the structures that support ecological injustice and attempts new forms of expression grounded in care for flora and fauna, for water, land, and air. It also wrestles with the impossibility of speaking ethically about "the environment" as a settler living within and benefiting from that will to destroy that so often doubles as nationalism.

While charting physical routes and terrains, Fast Commute connects statehood with grand-scale habitat annihilation in an effort to deepen understandings of and respect for place. Existing both within and outside the dissociative registers of colonialism and capitalism, this book is an attempt to see, learn, and live in relationship with the other-than-human life being degraded and destroyed, and to begin dealing with loss on a grand scale.