Aquarium Works (Hardcover)

Author: Ed Roberson

Publisher: Nion Editions (2022)

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Ed Roberson worked in the area’s steel mills, in an advertising graphics agency, and as a research assistant in limnology, studying inland and coastal freshwater systems on trips to Alaska and Bermuda. His scientific research, and his role in the Explorers Club of Pittsburgh’s South America expeditions, led him to a job working with exotic underwater animals. For several years in the late 1960s, he was employed as a diver and tankman at the newly formed Pittsburgh AquaZoo (now the PPG Aquarium), where he fed, cared for, and in some cases trained the creatures described in this collection. Widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of ecopoetry of our time, Roberson’s focus never moves far from the destructive dominance of racial whiteness that has long and unnaturally dominated our shared world and wreaked ruination on it. In his many published books, as in this one, he provides an unwhite (and unwhiting) take not only on the things that are but on language as it reaches out to them.