Of all the poets I have featured in these Sunday night posts, there is one whom I think everyone should read. That poet is Muriel Rukeyser. She is not the best poet I’ve featured here: She wrote a lot, especially when she was a single mother trying to raise her son after World War 2, and it’s of uneven quality; even in her best works she tended toward prolixity and overwriting. (In that she was like Walt Whitman, one of her major influences.) But she was among the most ambitious of poets in the forms and subjects she took on.

Rukeyser was a heartfelt American patriot, in her own idiosyncratic way, and a lifelong activist for social justice causes, someone who loved her country deeply but was clear-eyed about the injustices inflicted on others in the making of it. She was also intensely interested in science and the technological marvels of the 20th century, but again was well aware of the human cost that often accompanied them.

Below are the beginning of and additional excerpts from one of Rukeyser’s best-known works, “The Book of the Dead.” It’s a long documentary poem that tells the story of the Hawk’s Nest hydroelectric dam in West Virginia, the tunnel through which water flowed to feed its turbines, and — its primary focus — the hundreds of laborers, mostly poor Black men, who died in the digging of that tunnel, their lungs choked by inhaling the almost pure silica through which the tunnel ran.