Photograph of abandoned semi-trailer in Waldenburg, Arkansas.

The Sunk Country

The Arkansas Delta exists at the periphery of American consciousness, no matter that it has much to say about environmental and ecological collapse, about economic abandonment and human persistence. Dotted with struggling towns still (informally) segregated by race, the region embodies, and even magnifies, the paradoxes of a century of American “progress.”

There are many terms for the transformations that the Arkansas Delta has undergone over more than a century: settlement, reclamation, improvement. Here’s another: trauma.

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