Birth Marks

by Jim Daniels

A poet of the working-class and city streets, Jim Daniels's fourteenth poetry collection travels from Detroit to Ohio to Pittsburgh, from one post-industrial city to another, across jobs and generations. Daniels focuses on the urban landscape and its effects on its inhabitants as they struggle to establish community on streets hissing with distrust and random violence.

Out here, silence scrapes its knuckles
in an attempt at prayer.

Jim Daniels is Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Melon. Poetry editor for the scholarly journal A Working Class History of America , his awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Awards and the Brittingham Prize for Poetry.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

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.

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I was riding the jackass express
into the quicksand of bad grades and miscelleneous
misdemeanors."

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sweeping portrait of the poet's childhood and teen years in Detroit, his working-class family, the jobs that came and went, and really of the Rust Belt itself. Some of the poems concern the author's current-day career as a professor of literature and father himself, but while these are good, they take something away from the cohesive feeling of the book and its apparent primary focus on Detroit and industry. Still, it's a strong—very strong—collection and every single poem is quite good, with some being superb. What is more, you learn from this volume things you'd not gain if you read ten books of history of Detroit or the sociology of blue-collar American jobs. What you obtain here via Daniel's words is a picture of pride but also of the very fabric of the life Daniels knew growing up and how etched that life is within the stonework of the American spirit.

[Bill DeGenaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I am not a minister's son or a former pro boxer / but I have a few things to say" is a pretty great first line. Daniels' fourteenth book of poetry has some of his bleaker moments, involving various combinations of hit-and-run fatalities, alcoholics at funerals, and Detroit Tigers fandom. But he also balances poems focused on his working-class adolescence in Detroit (getting into trouble, listening to a lot of rock and roll) and poems focused focused on his middle-class life in an English department (a suicide on campus, a student who plagiarizes 70s song lyrics--Black Sabbath!--that take him back to those wild days), and that balance makes for a satisfying read.

[Andrea Janov · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is true to Daniels voice, the one that walks the lines of auto factory worker and Carnegie Mellon professor, father and some looking to cop, respectability and miscreant. His words are common and accessable, his worlds are real, he gives a voice to all of us who are caught between multiple identities.

[Mark Wigert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good, relatable, gritty, readable poems from a poet who grew up in Warren, Michigan during the 60s & 70s.

[Melissa Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love when authors write about Michigan and especially around the Detroit area.