The Blue-Collar Sun

The Blue-Collar Sun
Author: Lucas Farrell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre:
ISBN: 9781733653459

'The world is hard to find once you start looking for it' -- from its beginning, this book activates such a search (and sometimes wants to walk away from it) in such a startling way that by the breath-taking final section the poet finds himself searching for his relationship to a fish hook. Which of all objects looks most like a question mark, so the search becomes not one for answers but for the questions themselves, that Rilkean stance. Questions carry with them the obligation to go on, to carry on in any direction they may take us, and for the sake of the art of poetry Lucas Farrell does just that. His is a mind that never stops moving.

Blue Collar Poet

Blue Collar Poet
Author: Rocky Rhoads
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 119
Release: 2017-10-20
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1546211454

This book of poems is called Blue Collar Poet because Rhoads is not a highbrow poet. Her writings are based on everyday happenings and the humor she finds in life, as well as the sadness that comes to us all. She writes about the beauty of Colorado and the joy she takes from the creatures that reside in this lovely space. Her writing is very personal and can easily take the reader from laughter to tears. The reader is apt to be amazed at how openly the author shares her deepest feelings on one page and shifts to fun and self-deprecation on the next. Her wish for this book is that it be enjoyed.

What Work Is

What Work Is
Author: Philip Levine
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 89
Release: 2011-08-31
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0307761959

Winner of the National Book Award in 1991 “This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living ‘at the borders of dreams.’ One reads The Tempest ‘slowly to himself’; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of ‘the dark from the dark.’ What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language.” —Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal

Blue Collar Intellectuals

Blue Collar Intellectuals
Author: Daniel J. Flynn
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1497620821

Stupid is the new smart—but it wasn’t always so Popular culture has divorced itself from the life of the mind. Who has time for great books or deep thought when there is Jersey Shore to watch, a txt 2 respond 2, and World of Warcraft to play? At the same time, those who pursue the life of the mind have insulated themselves from popular culture. Speaking in insider jargon and writing unread books, intellectuals have locked themselves away in a ghetto of their own creation. It wasn’t always so. Blue Collar Intellectuals vividly captures a time in the twentieth century when the everyman aspired to high culture and when intellectuals descended from the ivory tower to speak to the everyman. Author Daniel J. Flynn profiles thinkers from working-class backgrounds who played a prominent role in American life by addressing their intellectual work to a mass audience. Blue Collar Intellectuals shows us how much everyone—intellectual and everyman alike—has suffered from mass culture’s crowding out of higher things and the elite’s failure to engage the masses.

Poetry Like Bread

Poetry Like Bread
Author: Martín Espada
Publisher:
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1994
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

An anthology of political poems by 33 poets from around the world. They write on war, poverty and hunger, as well as love of fellow man and the loneliness of revolutionary life.

The Lease

The Lease
Author: Mathew Henderson
Publisher: Coach House Books
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2012-10-30
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1770563229

Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013) Shortlisted for the Gerard Lampert Award (2013) Inspired largely by the poet's experiences as a young man working in the Saskatchewan oilfields, Mathew Henderson's The Lease explores masculinity and the roles morality, violence, and hard labor play in it. Equal parts character study, cultural documentary, and coming-of-age narrative, Henderson's poems make it clear that however we may try to stay apart from them, the stubborn and often unflattering realities of masculine culture persist, not just in isolated, dangerous environments like this, but in our very idea of what work is. No mark survives this place: you too will yield to unmemory. Give everything you are in three-day pieces. Watch the gypsy iron move, follow its commands. Tend the rusted steel like a shepherd. Shortlisted for the 2013 Gerald Lampert Award, presented by the League of Canadian Poets Mathew Henderson lives in Toronto, Ontario, writes about the prairies, and teaches at Humber College. The Lease is his first collection of poetry.

Together in a Sudden Strangeness

Together in a Sudden Strangeness
Author: Alice Quinn
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0593318722

In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives. “One of the best books of poetry of the year . . . Quinn has accomplished something dizzying here: arranged a stellar cast of poets . . . It is what all anthologies must be: comprehensive, contradictory, stirring.” —The Millions **Featuring 107 poets, from A to Z—Julia Alvarez to Matthew Zapruder—with work in between by Jericho Brown, Billy Collins, Fanny Howe, Ada Limón, Sharon Olds, Tommy Orange, Claudia Rankine, Vijay Seshadri, and Jeffrey Yang** As the novel coronavirus and its devastating effects began to spread in the United States and around the world, Alice Quinn reached out to poets across the country to see if, and what, they were writing under quarantine. Moved and galvanized by the response, the onetime New Yorker poetry editor and recent former director of the Poetry Society of America began collecting the poems arriving in her inbox, assembling this various, intimate, and intricate portrait of our suddenly altered reality. In these pages, we find poets grieving for relatives they are separated from or recovering from illness themselves, attending to suddenly complicated household tasks or turning to literature for strength, considering the bravery of medical workers or working their own shifts at the hospital, and, as the Black Lives Matter movement has swept the globe, reflecting on the inequities in our society that amplify sorrow and demand our engagement. From fierce and resilient to wistful, darkly humorous, and emblematically reverent about the earth and the vulnerability of human beings in frightening times, the poems in this collection find the words to describe what can feel unspeakably difficult and strange, providing wisdom, companionship, and depths of feeling that enliven our spirits. A portion of the advance for this book was generously donated by Alice Quinn and the poets to Chefs for America, an organization helping feed communities in need across the country during the pandemic.

Serena

Serena
Author: Ron Rash
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2008-10-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061470856

Penned by an award-winning writer, this Gothic tale of greed, corruption, and revenge is set against the backdrop of the 1930s wilderness and America's burgeoning environmental movement.

Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs

Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs
Author: Dr. Michael J. Collins
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2010-05-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1429923504

It looked for a while like Michael Collins would spend his life breaking concrete and throwing rocks for the Vittorio Scalese Construction Company. He liked the work and he liked the pay. But a chance remark by one of his coworkers made him realize that he wanted to involve himself in something bigger, something more meaningful than crushing rocks and drinking beer. In his acclaimed first memoir, Hot Lights, Cold Steel, Collins wrote passionately about his four-year surgical residency at the prestigious Mayo Clinic. Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs turns back the clock, taking readers from his days as a construction worker to his entry into medical school, expertly infusing his journey to become a doctor with humanity, compassion and humor. From the first time he delivers a baby to being surrounded by death and pain on a daily basis, Collins compellingly writes about how medicine makes him confront, in a very deep and personal way, the nature of God and suffering—and how delicate life can be.

Mianus Village

Mianus Village
Author: Jack T Scully
Publisher:
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2021-07-02
Genre:
ISBN: 9781943826841

Mianus Village provides vivid descriptions of the people, places, and events in the author's younger years growing up in the rough and tumble atmosphere of a government housing development established for World War II veterans. The poems in this book are vigorous and compelling, always comprehensible but never simplistic. They tell a story that pulls the reader forward at breakneck speed. They are full of wit and graphic detail.