Oil Spell gathers many of today’s dark energies—US drone strikes, environmental disaster—and asks: what kind of tool is poetry to mirror these violences? Oil Spell animates diverse influences—Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, environmental reports of extinction and endangerment, and the Pakistani government assessments of drone strikes. Oil Spell performs the ways in which narratives of loss and narratives of everyday joy curl into one another and mutually contaminate. The beauty that results is a troubled reflection, like a rainbow in a slick of oil.