Digger's Blues

by Jim Daniels

Poetry. These fourteen second-person poems collectively portray the life of Digger, the Detroit automobile factory worker featured in Daniels's earlier books. In this collection, Digger, now middle aged, confronts issues in his life such as downsizing, his own mortality, the changing racial composition of his neighborhood, and the trajectory or life. DIGGER'S BLUES is both deceptively straight-forward and acerbically witty, as evidenced in "Digger on the Nature Trail": "You're going to have to do something about money soon. You got an A in outdoor chef, but so did everybody else. Maybe that means your school had the best goddamn burger chefs in the world, but you think it means something else." Perfectbound.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published April 2, 2002

About the author

James Raymond Daniels (born 1956 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American poet and writer. Like his father and many of his friends, Daniels worked for the Ford Motor Company before college. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Alma College in 1978 and a master’s degree from Bowling Green State University in 1980. In his writing, he addresses the issues of blue collar work, adolescence, and determining the role of a poet. The factories proved a setting for many of his poems, which describe the hardships factory workers face.

Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English. The majority of Daniels' papers can be found within the Special Collections department of Michigan State University's main library.

Daniels' literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series. He won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.