Personal Problem

by Brendan Joyce

Brendan Joyce's Personal Problem, a smart and smarting collection of communist poetry for our capitalist crisis. Joyce's sensibility is dreamy (but not in the twee way), droll (but not in the posh way), and thoroughly exhausted (but not in the way that gives up). The collection, with its alternatingly flat and fiery exegesis of precarity and wage work and endings and beginnings and climate catastrophe and even the economics of its own existence, transcends most of what's out there. Get it!



Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing





"In cigarettes, six months' rent / is a year": Brendan Joyce's thrilling poems keep time to the beat of capitalism. We're going down, but Joyce is here to bring "the wreckage in from the wreckage, / into the wreckage." If you don't read him, you will die alone, simple as that.



Michael Robbins, author of Walkman and Equipment for Living







On the heels of his 2020 debut Love & Solidarity, Brendan has returned with a brand new collection of poems that circle his obsessions; money, class, work and the political economy of ecological collapse. In order to find the language for the means of economic exploitation and immiseration, Brendan focuses on its tempo, reordering our perception of time in the way capitalism imagines it; as a series of equations between commodities.



Poems in this collection were born from Kay Gabriel’s Poetry Project workshop “wouldn’t it be possible to eat everything? Bernadette Mayer’s poetry experiments”, others merely the tedium and terror of chronic unemployment in an ongoing global pandemic, while living through a worsening climate collapse. Flipped suddenly from his comforts as a low wage service industry worker, Brendan tries to track the way the world attempts to put itself back together, regardless of its least empowered workers’ say.







Brendan Joyce is a poet, teacher and essayist, from Cleveland, Ohio. He has had his poetry featured in venues ranging from Poetry Daily to The Brooklyn Rail. He is the author of three books of poetry; Character Limit (2019), Love & Solidarity (2020) and Personal Problem (2023), as well as a forthcoming memoir surplus years.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published September 15, 2023

Reviews

[b · Rating 5 out of 5]

“later sitting on the tub’s edge waiting for / you to pee, we take a picture of one another’s / glows humming slowly in the mid-century modern pink” (56)

[Nia Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book of poetry. I read it twice because I felt like I wanted to sit with a lot of these poems. This work felt like an acknowledgement of the state of the world, of what our governments want us to believe vs what is actually going on. Some of these really touched me like "Use Value", "Class Character", and I really loved the strong start of "Value Form" & many more. Some of them made me laugh, some of them put me in deep thought and reflection.

Page 18 and Page 23 have the same title, "Heist". I found this interesting and wondered if they were meant to be a continuation, but after reading them back to back I wasn't quite sure.

The iconic line: "Somewhere in the city, a wage steals itself."

[rory · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really enjoyed this and am thankful for the ARC i received!! i usually find poetry that uses modern language to not be for me, but I was happily surprised with how much I connected with the poems in here. I was particularly fond of the poems "Ides" and "Incoming Sob."

I'm excited to go back and re-read this and see what new meaning i can discern from a second read.