Badlands

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A poet and essayist explores the environmental "badlands" of Europe, Asia, and the U.S."A combination of Martin Amis-like hyperbolic prose and Bruce Chatwin-like wander-lust....An expansive map of the world's absurd zones". -- Kirkus ReviewsWelcome to Badlands. Welsh poet and essayist Robert Minhinnick has been a long-time environmental activist. In this book, his second collection of essays since the award-winning Watching the Fire Eater, he writes about his travels from the impoverishments of Albania to the scorched suburbia of Silicon Valley, by way of a foreign country called England, twenty thousand lakes, and a desert of dinosaur bones, from the Albertan Badlands of Canada to a British nuclear plant, to the coast of southern Wales, and the unending bus trips, hotels, and motels.Industrial smoke turns the noon sky black, beneath its clouds the poorest people in Europe arrange flowers on a dictator's grave. At a nuclear power plant the only sound is the sighing of photocopiers, another party of visitors gets ready for a tour. In "Ripper Country", in Whitechapel, Minhinnick discovers a perverse form of commercial pollution, as "a poster extends an invitation to 'Join the Ripper Trail'".Welcome to Badlands. Our guides are a survivor of Europe's most bizarre political regime, Mars Barlow, a poet who wishes to be abducted by aliens and who brings the author to a strange museum, a "dinosaur death camp", just outside the Hoodoo Motel, and the author himself, reluctant aide worker, the observing tourist with a computer tan, regretting his decision to call in at The Zoo for a quick one.