In the context of our unstable world, this chapter introduces key aspects of disaster and problematises the persistent and unhelpful binary between ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ disasters. It also sets out the book’s scope as being selected key Anglo-American English-language poetry collections of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the subjects of which are major disasters. It summarises these disasters, introducing the related primary texts, firstly, as disasters arising from man-made industrial settings with Mario Petrucci’s Heavy Water (Chernobyl) and Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (Hawk’s Nest Tunnel); secondly, as natural hazards exacerbated by human action, or indeed inaction, with Hurricane Katrina, primarily through Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler; and thirdly, with Arctic ice melt as a proxy indicator of the Anthropocene’s climate catastrophe through collections by Nick Drake, Helen Mort and Nancy Campbell. It establishes questions regarding the potential to identify the poetry of disaster as a distinct mode; notions around the witnessing of disaster through poetry (including the ethical considerations that might arise from those writings); and what poetics and poetic language might, uniquely, be available to us in describing the actuality of disaster and the life-threatening extremes of our current global experience of the Anthropocene.