This chapter examines two poetry collections prompted by major industrial disasters of the twentieth century: the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident (Petrucci) and the 1931 Hawk’s Nest Tunnel mining disaster (Rukeyser). Taking American academic and poet Carolyn Forché’s definition of the ‘poetry of witness’ as works by ‘poets who endured conditions of historical and social extremity’, the chapter argues that while neither Petrucci nor Rukeyser directly experienced their respective disaster events (Petrucci wrote Heavy Water in Britain and Rukeyser visited Hawk’s Nest in 1936, several years after the event), their resulting collections constitute a form of temporally or geographically removed secondary witness. Furthermore, this witnessing from a site of reduced proximity, as theorised in Anna Veprinska’s concept of the ‘unhere’, inevitably results in a form of artistic displacement. Engaging with poetry of witness involves crossing into a space already governed by casualties and first-hand witnesses: the space of their respective disasters.