In the first group of poems Rukeyser begins to weave together testimony, history, travel writing, ethnography, chemistry, and other discourses. These terms are what I have read in Culler’s chapter as numerous descriptions such as poems, stories, plays, language, imaginative writing, etc. Culler described that theorists demonstrate a powerful literariness at work in supposedly non-literary texts, thus complicating the distinction between the literary and the non-literary. However, Rukeyser employs literature as she integrates documents, graphs, and mathematics alongside the conventional designs of structures linked to the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel tragedy in Gauley Bridge in the 1930s. Numerous instances of environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and industrial accidents have occurred. This functions as a piece of literature because the poem is named “The Road” when Rukeyser first opens it. Rukeyser has been hinting at the Gauley Bridge incidents; thus, the idea of the roads is to tie us, the readers, to the narrative as not unique, but to portray it as such is part of a broader national story. Despite the human cost, there have been significant industrial accomplishments by those in the working class who are impacted by the Hawks Nest Tunnel tragedy. There were many males, and most of them were African Americans. The Union Carbide project was hiring those workers to dig a tunnel wherein a significant number of deaths have resulted from this project. Due to the employees’ exposure to silica dust, this was silicosis, a fatal lung condition. The way Rukeyser writes the shape of my thinking about this tragedy is because of the fact that she has been introducing the Hawks’ Nest Tunnel tragedy. Consequently, the personnel engaged in tunnel excavation have been exposed to lethal silica dust. It has resulted in many deaths and silicosis. Rukeyser has been fusing a documentary and poetry hybrid according to the miners’ testimonies that were heard throughout the trial and where she’s been going to and learning about the fate of those individuals as well as the land. When we read her poetry, we can see that it aims to demonstrate and express that on the human cost of inequalities, injustices, and acts of violence committed during the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel. A great number of victims were not included in the figures and reports, as well as being disregarded.

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