In the early 1930s, workers drilling the Hawks Nest Tunnel in West Virginia were exposed to silica dust while diverting water for industrial power. Hundreds, many of them Black migrant workers, died from silicosis. The disaster joined labour exploitation, geology, river engineering, and environmental injustice.

Muriel Rukeyser transformed the disaster into The Book of the Dead, one of the landmark documentary poem sequences of the twentieth century. Her work showed that poetry could investigate testimony, geology, corporate power, and poisoned breath without surrendering lyric intensity.