Ted Mathys Gold Cure

"This is a manuscript that grapples with the Anthropocene. It engages big themes such as legacy, damage, environment, greed, humanity, culpability, and love all at the same time. An elegy via allegory, it's a call to action in no small way"--
Lustrous, tender, and expansive, Gold Cure moves from boomtown gold mines and the mythical city of El Dorado to the fracking wells of the American interior, excavating buried histories, legacies of conquest, and the pursuit of shimmering ideals. Ted Mathys skewers police brutality on the ribs of a nursery rhyme and drives Petrarchan sonnets into shale fields deep under the prairies. In crystalline language rich with allegory and wordplay, Mathys has crafted a moving elegy for the Anthropocene.
From gold rushes to black gold, this mythic and sought-after substance gilds Ted Mathys's elegiac poems, placing a glimmering mirror between resource extraction and utopian dreaming, exploitation and emotional longing.