The Caving Grounds - by Kathleen Heideman (Paperback)

About the Book

Heideman excavates the rubble of Negaunee, a small town in Upper Michigan hollowed by a century of mining. The extraction of hematite caused underground collapses and sinkholes; undermined neighborhoods condemned and dangerous areas fenced

Book Synopsis

Kathleen M. Heideman's The Caving Grounds excavates the rubble of Negaunee, a small town in Upper Michigan hollowed by a century of mining. The extraction of hematite caused underground collapses and sinkholes; undermined neighborhoods were deemed unstable; homes, churches and even cemeteries were moved, and dangerous areas fenced. Thankfully, a guide will emerge: Rusty.

"Her guide is Rusty, a drinker and a daredevil who travels the danger zones where people, houses, and herds of cattle have been lost. With Rusty and other residents, Heideman descends into the past through virgin forests, indigenous knowledge, and strong headwinds of economic development that lead to depletion. She travels underground, much the same as going down to Hades to witness the clammy workplaces that never would see the sun." -Sheila Packa, author of Night Train Red Dust

"In Kathleen M. Heideman, Upper Michigan's wild woods and creatures and old timber towns and mining communities and rich but wounded earth itself have found one of their truest poetic voices. Freighted deep with her vast natural, cultural, ecological, historical, and-above all-local knowledge, her work both sings and heals the place that births it." -Jonathan Johnson, author of The Desk on the Sea

"The Caving Grounds is one of the most original books I've ever read. It is partly an impressionistic history of actual caving grounds, but it is much more than that. There is weeping here. There is wild humor, passion, and mystery." -Jim Moore, author of Underground

"The Caving Grounds is one hundred pages of unique, incredible, brilliant, harrowing, sad, funny, informative, and powerfully moving poems." -- Tom Powers, Michigan in Books

Kathleen M. Heideman is the author of A Brief Report on the Human Animal and Psalms of the Early Anthropocene. She lives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Book #2 in the Yooper Poetry Series

From Modern History Press

Review Quotes

"The Caving Grounds is one of the most original books I've ever read. It is partly an impressionistic history of actual caving grounds, but it is much more than that. There is weeping here. There is wild humor, passion, and mystery. The narrator sometimes resembles the 'feral grandchild' mentioned in one of the poems: wild, untamed, singing at the top of her lungs. But more often she aches for the caving ground, aches with the stories she sings to us, for all that has been destroyed and for the beauty of life somehow preserved. This is an amazing and unforgettable book." --Jim Moore, author of Underground and Prognosis

"In Kathleen Heideman, Upper Michigan's wild woods and creatures and old timber towns and mining communities and rich but wounded earth itself have found one of their truest poetic voices. Hers is work that both sings and heals the place that births it. Freighted deep with Heideman's vast natural, cultural, ecological, historical, and -above all-local knowledge, The Caving Grounds adds to my great adoration (and, yes, delighted mythologization) of this poet of the Yellow Dog River wilds." --Jonathan Johnson, author of In the Land We Imagined Ourselves and The Desk on the Sea

"'It all begins with loss, ' Kathleen Heideman declares, and she warns that 'You better wear long sleeves / when you enter our sunken places.' Her poems will make you tremble at the destruction wrought: the caving ground that swallows a town; the poisons left behind by mining. In a prodigious act of mythmaking, the poet has begun the difficult work of mending our greedy past, probing the most intimate pockets of place and history. Innovation marks her work as extraordinary. Her imagination shows us how to mourn and love." --Todd Davis, author of Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems

"Kathleen Heideman has written a heartbreaking exegesis of the gutted iron mining communities of the Upper Peninsula. The Caving Grounds is simultaneously loving and damning, hallucinatory and erudite, playful and ruthless." --Marcia Bjornerud, author of Turning to Stone and Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

"The poems in Kathleen Heideman's The Caving Grounds unfold 'accordion-style': they constrict, fold in, crackle, and breathe out the history of Negaunee. As poems explore 'the delineation of the orebody, ' how 'these lands are pocked with holes that swallow anecdotal evidence, ' Heideman unearths the narrative, blending her position as poet-investigator to ensure a grand effort in crafting a 'Complete History / of the Terrain in question.' 'O the lichens have their work cut out for them / forgetting our names!' is a brave challenge, as Heideman balances the preservation of this town's rich history through her earthy observations. And yet, how precise can our 'metaphors of labor' be in our language, while still listening to the 'mouth of the mineshaft'? Heideman's poems give support and structure to keep these voices and land alive." --Carly Joy Miller, author of Ceremonial and Like a Beast

"In The Caving Grounds, Kathleen Heideman memorably marries poetry and history, labor and geology, as she goes down into the old mines beneath Negaunee, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Sometimes she has a guide, her own Virgil, as she peels back the history and geology, until she arrives at the oldest fossils in the world. She can't escape the work she has to do, but it's hard! But she comes back to the people, the old ones who give her the necessary stories of the work and the place. She comes back to the land and the Lakes, even as the ground caves into the abandoned mines below her." -Keith Taylor, author of All the Time You Want and The Bird-while