Michelle Sterling

A recently graduated PhD student in Poetics takes a short-term post as a literature instructor in the far north. When he arrives, the particularities of his position are puzzling: his living quarters are in a foreclosed strip mall in an abandoned oil town, and his students are not aspiring poets but indifferent laborers who spend their days at a secretive worksite in the woods. After growing close to a woman who lives and works in a brothel across the highway, the itinerant professor soon learns what the purpose of the camp really is, and unwittingly becomes instrumental to its violent unraveling.