Boys and Oil

I have been waiting for this book. Boys and Oil is more than a memoir, it is a protest. Taylor Brorby has created a bridge between daydreams and nightmares; the gentle stirrings of the prairie and the violence of the oil and gas industry. We see through the lens of a gay man, how character and identity are shaped by the landscapes that raise us. There is nothing sentimental in these pages. The Literary West is more complete because of this stand up story of beauty and brokenness by a fearless writer named Brorby.

— Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion -- Essays of Undoing

Crude

“In Crude, a stunning poetic debut, Taylor Brorby fights for the environmental landscape of his home in the North Dakota Bakken fields ‘like a pike with a hook in its mouth.’ With a passionate voice, profound courage, and deft imagistic skills, he brings an ‘unrelenting and fierce’ energy to the page in hopes of protecting for all of us a ‘world filled with the necessity of beauty.’”

— Mary Swander, Poet Laureate of Iowa, author of The Girls on the Roof

Coming Alive

“Taylor Brorby has been as tireless as anyone I know in his fight to protect the planet in general, and his beloved high plains of North Dakota in particular. This account of his visits to the Bakken oil fields and to Standing Rock, his acts of resistance and subsequent arrest, is a powerful call to action, a primal scream of anguish and love for the original mother we must now link arms to protect.”

—Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted

Fracture

“One imagined that the energy industry would find ways to dig deep enough and find forms of pressure strong enough to force the last crushed history of the earth’s vegetation up out of the earth, into refineries, and then into combustion engines, and then into the atmosphere, but most of us had not imagined they would do so by risking the pollution of the world’s deep aquifers, finding a way to foul air and water in a single technology. It requires a seismic response from the human imagination: this anthology is doing that work.”

—Robert Hass, Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997

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