Steam Laundry

by Nicole Stellon O'Donnell

Steam Laundry is a novel in poems based on the true story of Sarah Ellen Gibson, a miner’s wife during the Klondike and Alaska gold rushes. Her journey began as she followed her husband to Dawson City, Yukon Territory in 1898. She stayed there three years as the town’s boom and her marriage burned out. In 1903, she left her husband and sons to start over in Fairbanks, Alaska with another man. Based on archival research and incorporating historical documents and photographs, the poems approach the past through the ghosts of correspondence.
 
The poems, written in the voices of Gibson, her family members, and the people who knew her, take on love, loss, failure, and desire. Some confront the drama of failed marriages, troubled family relationships, and alcoholism. Others spin the dramatic details of hunting accidents and subarctic survival into compelling stories in verse. They embody the opposing voices of an era during which men and women struggled in different, but overlapping, universes.
 
By staring at Gibson through the spectral lenses of the people around her, the documents she left behind, and the vision of a contemporary poet, the particulars of Gibson’s life are transformed into an exploration of the people history usually forgets. Steam Laundry offers the reader the chance to try on the dusty, mining-town overcoat of Gibson’s life.

 

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s new book, Everything Never Comes Your Way is forthcoming fall 2021. You Are No Longer in Trouble was the 2019 open reading winner for the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry. Her first collection, Steam Laundry, won the 2013 WILLA Literary Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Beloit Poetry Journal, Zyzzyva, and other literary journals. Her essays and commentaries have appeared in the Anchorage Daily News on the Alaska Public Radio Network. She received both an Individual Artist Award and an Artist Fellowship from the Rasmuson Foundation, as well as a Boochever Fellowship from the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation. In 2014, she served the winter writer-in-residence at Denali National Park. She is currently serving a two-year term as a Heinemann Fellow.