Rauscher, JudithJudithRauscher2019-09-192015-09-032015978-1-910018-00-2978-1-910018-01-9https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/39331Mathew Henderson’s debut poetry collection 'The Lease' (2012) stands out in the field of Canadian petro-poetry because it explores the environmental and social fractures caused by Canadian oil production from inside its labor sphere. An analysis of the collection from a perspective informed by Marxist ecocriticism, that is, an analysis which pays special attention to the effects of capitalist modes of production on ecosocial relations, reveals texts that struggle for and at the same time sabotage a bluecollar aesthetic of petroleum culture. Henderson’s poems both construct and actively subvert an imagined working-class, oil-fuelled masculinity marked by a celebration of heterosexuality and technological domination over the land. The Lease dramatizes the transformation of the speaker from a country boy into a poet of the oil patch, thus retracing the shift of the oft idealized Canadian prairie from a pastoral space to a drilling and waste-dumping ground. It is this deconstruction of the oilman and of his relationship to the land, I argue, that shores up a distinctly proletarian eco-poetics of oil, rooted not only in an experience of the land, but in living off the land in a present and future that weighs heavily on nature and its ability to satisfy humanity’s growing energy demand.engCanadian literatureoil poetrypetroleum industryMarxist ecocriticismworking-class masculinitybookpart