ABSTRACT
Negro-Mountain-Wolves/Notes on Region is a section in C.S. Giscombe’s poetry book (in progress in January 2019), Negro Mountain. It concerns the recent eastern migrations of North American wolves and the histories, also recent, of humans on and in regard to Negro Mountain. The mountain of the title is a ridge in the Allegheny Mountains of the eastern United States; it straddles the Pennsylvania—Maryland border and its summit is the highest point in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The work’s nature is investigatory, and themes of the project include responses to both the “natural world” (notably the described relations between predators and prey) of the northeastern United States and the languages of race and historical conquest, also in relation to that region. The work argues for “location” to be considered not as a reference to an unmoving place but as a practice for composition and as a strategy for reading itself as the writing (the most basic content of the piece) traces the contours—psychical, physical, political—of the named mountain.
