The Small Sea is a hybrid-genre novel delving into the strata of histories underlying the troubled southern Italian city of Taranto, site of the second-largest steel mill in Europe. Known in antiquity for its hyacinths and cultic mysteries, Taranto is now covered by air so thick that reddish dust falls from it, choking the wind off the Mar Piccolo (or “Small Sea”). Fractured, like Taranto itself, by the impossibility of accounting for a world that chooses profit margins and dead minerals over all other forms of life, The Small Sea assembles lyrical queer ecologies and broken bits of encyclopedia entries. The narrative reimagines the story of Persephone, exploring how women might find their own ways back from the underworlds of violent extraction and possession. By overlaying the present reality of a sacrifice zone on the fragments of antiquity left from Magna Graecia, the novel seeks hope in the ruins of myths that promised progress and delivered only dust.