In this the first month of the new year, amidst the theatrical and accelerated stirring of the global financial embers (the peaks & valleys, the bait & switch, the puppetry, the disparities), we bring you eight varied, relevant, thoughtful and powerful texts from the following authors: Jean Day, Mary Burger, Joshua Clover, Jen Coleman, Rachel Zolf, Tim Shaner, William Cloud, and Marie Buck. To download a pdf of this issue, click here.

MARY BURGER has held many of the jobs portrayed by Lena Dunham on TV, but she has never been the daughter of an artist from Tribeca.

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Laboradory

My parents grew food.  They grew up growing food.  Vegetable, animal.  My father’s family had a dairy farm.  In a faded picture his father leads some neighbors in a barn raising.  Bartering labor for labor.  My mother’s father was a carpenter.  He built the church steeple that still punctuates their little town.

JEAN DAY has been paid to work as an amanuensis, waitress, member of a demolition crew, cook (short order and live-in), hospital attendant for mentally disabled adults, administrative gopher, warehouse clerk, acquisitions manager, executive director (these last three at Small Press Distribution, where she happily toiled for 14 years after finishing college), copywriter, teacher, marketing editor, and academic editor—almost entirely in the nonprofit sphere.

JEN COLEMAN is a Minnesotan living in Portland, OR by way of DC and New York.  She currently applies her skills as a factory worker, gas station attendant, dish washer, chocolate shaver, night stocker and school bus driver to her work as outreach director for Oregon Environmental Council. Jen helps organize the Spare Room reading series and writes with the 13 Hats creative collective.

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It's okay to mourn what's impossible.

RACHEL ZOLF is a poet.

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In response, I think of Akilah. Akilah Oliver. She is never that far away. I think of her body, transformed, alone, dead. I think of her words, rapture and rupture…a gone time…a calculated blue.

WILLIAM CLOUD was born in 1997 in San Francisco, CA, the son of Quemadura Cloud and the poet Amina Calil. 

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My Life in the Tush of Goats

I've been reading and writing poetry more or less since I was an adolescent living a stultifying existence in a small, central California agricultural town.

MARIE BUCK has worked at various movie theaters and coffee shops, at a Michaels Arts and Crafts, as managing editor of an academic journal, and lately teaches courses in African American literature, composition, and gender studies. She is the author of Life & Style (Patrick Lovelace Editions 2009) and the chapbook Amazing Weapons (Scary Topiary 2011). You can find some recent work at Two Serious Ladies: http://www.twoseriousladies.org/author/marie-buck/.

JOSHUA CLOVER is a writer and political antagonist living in the Bay Area. He has monetized his poetry by becoming a teacher, sometimes.

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Thanks for inviting me to contribute. As I warned you, I am sort of a skeptic, or maybe it’s just that I want more, I always want more. It is already a lovely thing and I want to throw a penny in the wishing well for some further findings.

The thing I have loved about it is the ethnographic element.

TIM SHANER works as a full-time part-timer at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon and as a full-time part-timer at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. Picture X, his first full-time part-time book of poetry, will be published by Airlie Press full-time in 2014. With Kristen Gallagher, he edited Wig, a magazine devoted to poetry and art that appropriates the job, partly or fully, for artistic purposes (sans benefits).

Fall is here, and we are pleased to announce a new set of texts - this month, poetry and prose - considering poetry, politics, and labor.  This autumn edition features Francesca Lisette, Jared Stanley, Lindsay Turner, and Sara Wintz on how to address a Tory, unemployment as apocalypse, writing precarity, and teaching writing / writing writing. To download a pdf of these pieces, click here.
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