‘Clean Coal Burn’ Smolders Its Way to an Explosion
When I sat down with Kip Knott’s 2021 collection, Clean Coal Burn, I didn’t really know what to expect. The relationship of nearly every Appalachian to coal and the coal industry is fraught with complicated, convoluted feelings. We respect it, we hate it, we love the way it made us feel when it whispered to us of prosperity and an end to fears of insecurity. We’ve watched it drive a rusty knife deep into the heart of the land with the nonchalance of a grandmother docking a pie crust. Knott has watched for a lot longer than I have. He’s seen the blood, as it were, and he explores the folds and tangles of Appalachian loyalty and hatred for the industry with an always-competent, sometimes-transcendent voice.
The book is divided into sections according to the lens the writer is using for the works they contain. Page after page stumbles through the smoke and pollution, the abandonment and decay of the industry that shaped our region. The poems walk down dim halls of familial relationships that play out in carefully-sculpted half-statements and implications, platonic shadows of love cast against a very real screen woven of trauma and generations-long frustration. Then Knott leads us through the family he made for himself in a series of meditations on husbandhood and fatherhood. Each section feels like an arc, sometimes seeming to jump backward in the author’s life to pick up the timeline from a different perspective.
The book as a whole is full of love, in the way that a collapsing metal barn – squealing apart and crashing to the ground – is full of music. It’s a messy, complicated look at what it means to live and grow in a place that remembers the disdain of outsiders in its very rock. It has that most critical quality of poetry, an unflinching commitment to giving its readers a taste of the truth. It doesn’t try to romanticize the destruction it profiles. In Kait Rokowski’s “it was only ever red” model, it shows you the dynamite and the sulfuric acid and the dead deer floating in the impoundment pond, and it dares you to make excuses for the corporations who worked that violence on the land and its people.
On a personal level, this book has become important to me. It made me cry, which is something of a metric because of my historic inability to experience catharsis. From the beginning I was academically interested, morbidly curious as I read through the first section, “Something In The Wind.” Poem after poem flickered like a horror movie trailer between details of environmental devastation. Then on page 29, Knott wrote, of a man struck mute by complications of black lung:
…He scribbles on his yellow pad
that there is a kind of beauty in the after-birth
of sheep, the way it steams
in spring snow as if the land were alive.
Then, in his sadness, he forgets and tries to speak.
The white stones of his words clatter at his feet.
This, of course, crushed me, and won me over for the long haul of the book. The pages that follow rarely give any room for comfort. That’s a risk with any work that deals with issues so close to home and so unmitigatedly wrenching. But Knott allows his readers to love and hate in equal measure, and that, to me, is a sign of a good book.
As a poetry collection, Clean Coal Burn isn’t long enough to emotionally exhaust a reader. I managed it in two sittings, and I have no doubt someone with a more ordered mind could take the whole thing in one go. As you read, feel for the smoldering below the surface, and wait for the moments that it flares up the way Knott describes in “Lost Fires” and “Dreams From Underground.” The fire is scorching, filthy, and purifying.
