The majority of our waking hours are spent in some relation to work: commuting to/from work, thinking about work, and doing the work itself—insert argument for reduced work-time models, insert argument to stop asking people about their dream job—so of course it makes sense that our jobs find their way into our writing. But ten years ago, when I was in the thick of working as a wilderness guide, I would not have predicted that this job would become the basis for Level Watch, my first book.
Level Watch is based on my time working in wilderness therapy for a substance-abuse treatment center in the Blue Ridge Mountains. As guides, we shepherded people—most of whom were undergoing radical transformations—safely through the backcountry. I started writing the book out of a need to process the experience; I thought of it primarily as an elegy. It wasn’t until I’d been working on it for a few years that one editor told me she considered it an “untold story of the opioid epidemic”—the perspective of a treatment center employee.
In honor of Labor Day, I’ve compiled a reading list of other contemporary poetry collections with dispatches from jobs—a nursing home, KFC, a tech company—as well as commentary on labor itself. I appreciate the candor and complexity with which these writers convey such varied accounts of work—and if you contemplate your relationship to work even half as much as I do, I think you’ll appreciate them, too.
Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz
This coming-of-age book contains a series of “Requiem” poems about working on an orchard as a boy. de la Paz utilizes a “we” that transcends the speaker’s singular experience: “…how we each knew we were getting ripped off and how the filthy / dollars we’d wad into our pockets couldn’t buy us a fuller river, time…” Our earliest jobs are often where we learn how we’re viewed by others and therefore what roles we’re expected to fill in the world at-large. The boys in these poems earn “quick dollars / doing nothing except being boys, learning without comprehension, / the difficult industry of men.”
Fixer by Edgar Kunz
Here we read about various temp jobs. So many ways to make so little money. There’s also a quieter thread: Kunz’s poems remind me of the government’s role in our financial (in)stability. “An election happens,” we read in one poem. It’s a slipped-in, standalone sentence without fanfare, but in a poem titled “Squatters,” I would argue it’s offering commentary. In “Account,” money owed to an ex will be forgiven if the speaker will allow the ex to claim him as a dependent on her taxes: “I couldn’t believe / my luck. I let myself be claimed.”
The Hands of a Stranger: Poems from the Nursing Home by Janice N. Harrington
Harrington’s poems describe the senescent body in unflinching detail that only an intimate caregiver could provide. There are moments when the nurse aides show tenderness through their competence (“Efficiency too is loveliness, is mercy. / The sheet smoothed beneath a naked haunch”) and moments when readers witness the opposite (“There is a way to drop a body atop a hard mattress, / to scrub gentle parts too hard”). Caregiving is complicated work—often moralized and underpaid—and there’s a bravery required to describe it so honestly.
God of the Kitchen by Jon Tribble
I once bussed breakfast tables at a fancy hotel where all employees could eat free lunch in the staff cafeteria, but you weren’t allowed to change out of your uniform first. The higher-ups ate in their business professional clothing, so the uniform felt like a way of keeping the service workers in our place, like branding us. Tribble, in his book about his years working sixty- and seventy-hour weeks at KFC, articulates the potency of a uniform in “Polyester:” “Whatever our religion these were our vestments / now and until we disrobed … the wear and tear sure to mark us in more indelible / ways than any fabric could ever hope to cover up.”
Human Resources by Ryann Stevenson
A central thread in Stevenson’s book is the sexism within the tech industry. Her boss informs her: “the glass ceiling was high / but it was there.” A moment like this comes as no surprise after reading, in the title poem, about a department where women are sent after filing harassment claims: “each woman has her own fax machine / to do her pretend work: messages scribbled / on lightweight paper and sent / to nowhere.” I find the “pretend work” particularly devastating. In the world of this poem, a company would rather pay women to do futile tasks than to rectify a misogynistic culture. Yet another poem features women turning into inanimate skyscrapers. There’s a disembodied tone that unifies the book. The poems speak with a clinical distance, a sterile remove that is reinforced by the book’s title.
Vantage by Taneum Bambrick
“When I stepped into the stilted trailer the crew knew I was because of a dad.” Bambrick does not write, “I was there because of a dad,” and the omitted word gives us pause, makes us reconsider what we might otherwise quickly read, accept, and move on. Through both the narrative content and the careful attention to syntax, Bambrick lays bare and upends our expectations about class, gender, and sexuality in this collection about working on a garbage crew. What for one person might be a lifelong career in manual labor, for another might be a casual summer gig brokered through a family connection. The demands on the body are viewed differently when temporary. Bambrick consistently juxtaposes people, images, and experiences in ways that invite serious inquiry.
Making a Living by Rosalie Moffett
I often hear the term reproductive labor used to describe unpaid work like cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children, but I hear it less often to describe the labor of bearing children. We call childbirth labor yet not the pregnancy itself. And what’s talked about even less is the work it can take just to reach the point of conception: “I bled through the napkin put there to be bled on … My uterus, a knocked-out tooth / of dark dye on the X-ray.” Many people labor to become pregnant in the first place. The title of Moffett’s book cleverly alludes to two kinds of labor: making a living as earning money, versus making a living as creating new life.
Seam by Tarfia Faizullah
At its core, Seam follows in the tradition of poetry of witness or docupoetics, but bearing witness—especially to atrocity—is also a type of work. A humanitarian labor. This harrowing book documents accounts from women who were raped and tortured during 1971’s Bangladesh Liberation War. Faizullah’s poems and her positionality are both rigorously considered. In “The Interviewer Acknowledges Shame,” the shame arrives when the speaker “begins to write about it in third person, / as though it was that simple / to unnail myself from my own body.” The labor here is not just in the gathering or writing, but in refusing to look away. This is a kind of work that goes far beyond occupation. It is difficult, and it is necessary.
