“A stunning collage. . . . [Nowak] is a legislator whose job is allowing others to be heard.”
—The New York Times Sunday Book Review
“Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary defies easy genre labels—it’s a documentary poem, a collage, a primal cry—and makes me want to throw it against the wall in the best way.”
—Leslie Jamison, The New York Times Book Review
“Mark Nowak is restoring the perspective of working class Americans to contemporary American poetry.”
—The Buffalo News
“The aim of making poetry to make change, to make history, is what makes Nowak’s work most radical and most daring, moving into the realm where knowing is a kind of collective being and doing.”
—Kenyon Review
“An imaginative and shocking reminder of what it means, in the most human and poignant terms, to be a miner, whether in this country or in China, or for that matter anywhere in the industrial world. It is also a tribute to miners and working people everywhere. It manages, in photos and in words, to portray an entire culture. And it is a stunning educational tool.”
—Howard Zinn
