Those who can’t move become receptacles for our trash. We have always remanded garbage to the margins, to silent locations of despair, or tossed it into streams and watched it float away like a toy boat we can’t trace. Out of sight, out of mind allows us to rest easier because we want to believe that there is no lead in our tap water, no dioxin in our kids’ blood, no legal, well-designed, well-operated, and well-maintained combustion device throwing shit up into our backyards. After all, there is always someone else carrying the burden for us. It’s an illusion, this “poison-redistribution,” because what we expel from our backyards eventually returns—but in more diabolical forms. Mass cannot be destroyed, only rearranged )
How can anyone step out of the cycle?  

 

Eiren Caffall, Our Rivrrinere DNA, review of Kerri Arsenault,  

Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains