In Line for the Exterminator: Poems

Great Lakes Books Series

by Jim Daniels

In Line for the Exterminator is the final collection in Jim Daniels’s trilogy of books explaining the urban working-class landscape. Daniels, who grew up near the Eight Mile Road boundary between Detroit and suburban Warren, Michigan, walks the razor’s edge of the borderline in this collection, examining complex issues of race and class that are a part of daily life there.

The title poem, "In Line for the Exterminator," sets the ironic tone for this collection, examining a group of people waiting in line for a sinister-sounding amusement-park ride. Daniels presents blue-collar culture both in and out of the workplace, showing its profound influence on the lives of workers and their families. As in Places/Everyone and M-80, Daniels uses his character Digger to show the effects of work on outside life, following Digger into retirement from his factory job and into his struggle to find a new future. In addition, Daniels deals frankly with the specter of urban violence that haunts the community and threatens to tear it apart. Local heroes, from professional wrestler the Sheik to the contemporary rapper Eminem, also appear as touchstones for the community’s complex view of itself.

How do ordinary citizens sustain hope and dignity in the face of economic and societal upheaval? How do people avoid the mirages offered by drugs and alcohol, or the intoxication of guns and crime? In Line for the Exterminator offers no easy answers but presents searing portraits of individuals struggling with these questions and finding small victories and moments of consolation in their everyday lives. Those interested in poetry, depictions of working-class city life, and Detroit social history will enjoy this significant volume.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2007

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

[Sarah Buzz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm always up for reading things that are set in my hometown, but this one was meh. I didn't get a rush from it that I thought I would. The writing was well done, and I enjoyed the strength in his poetry, it is well put together

[Kenneth Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit too elitist, but very poignant.

[Sarah Rearigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm always up for reading things that are set place in my home town, but this one was meh. I didn't get a rush from it that I thought I would. The writing was well done, and I enjoyed the strength in his poetry, it is well put together.