Overburden: Poems

On the surface of a mine, overburden is the excess landscape--soil, stone, roots--excavated and pushed aside to get to the valuable material below. But what accumulates when we displace and disrupt? Inside the language of extraction, what can we undercover in that overlooked excess?

Jolene Brink's Overburden excavates these questions. Across four sweeping sections, the collection probes what we disturb in our relentless digging, whether naming the stars, mining the past, or giving birth in an uncertain century. The excess of overburden becomes a luminous site of wonder, grief, and reckoning.

When such a dig is done, overburden is used to fill the seam left behind, an attempt to reclaim the land without fully acknowledging what was taken. Brink's poems inhabit this uneasy process of restoration--intimate, global, planetary. They speak from clear-cuts and gravel pits, pandemic nurseries and glacial seams, gathering the personal and the historical into a layered archive of presence and loss.

With precision and tenderness, Brink documents and elegizes the aftermath of extraction, the compulsion to put something back. Overburden is a record of those attempts, a powerful meditation on inheritance, labor, motherhood, and the reverberations of human impact on both land and self.

Jolene Brink was born and raised in Northern Minnesota. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Orion, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, The Carolina Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, where her first poetry chapbook, Peregrine, won the Merriam-Frontier Award. She currently works for the University of Minnesota.