Oil Courses

Winner of the 2025 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

Grounded in deep concern about the climate crisis, Carolyn
Williams-Noren's Oil Courses recalls a family reliant on the oil
industry--her father worked for British Petroleum in Anchorage, Alaska--and a
summer spent in its service on Endicott Island. What "curriculum" has oil
offered each of us? To answer, Oil Courses turns to strange happenings in
the changing landscape and in our interior lives, magnifying odd scenes that
once seemed ordinary and filing them under the names of school subjects such as
physics, economics, and history.

In these poems, the absurd, the beautiful, and the alarming collide. Tiny fish begin to swim sideways,
poisoned. The permafrost melts. Whales are hunted and skinned. The high school
yearbook features students who have hit moose with their cars. The speaker of
one poem wins a trophy for an essay on the subject "What Petroleum Means to Me," presented
by a group of women called the "Petroleum Wives."

Oil Courses speaks to our collective reliance on exploitative industries and questions our
responsibilities and relationships to the natural world. These poems are droll,
revealing, and ultimately haunting.