Variations of Labor

(Paperback)

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Description

Alex Gallo-Brown explores through poetry, essays, and fiction what it means to labor in modern-day America. Stories about semiprofessional poker players, line cooks in high-tech company cafeterias, and an activist trying to drum up support for a union paint a bleak picture of dead-end jobs and truncated hopes, but also depict the roiling just underneath the surface of all those who have been disrespected and written off.

Reviews

"Alex Gallo-Brown is the poet of the service economy. He has found the language for the moment that work, having shed much of its physical cost, begins to trifle with our brains. In all of his writing, fiction and non-, he is a poet of loneliness, but he is also young, he is in the company of idealists, and his work is filled with longing, attention to the urban Pacific Northwest, and discovery of the clowns and geniuses of the workplace. Breaking ranks with the self-analyzers, he speaks out in these stories and poems for the brotherhood and the sisterhood of the indentured." -- Valerie Trueblood, author of Search Party, Terrarium, and other works of fiction, and contributing editor to The American Poetry Review

Author Bio

ALEX GALLO-BROWN is a poet, journalist, and labor activist from Seattle.