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Late Invocation for Magic
In poems selected from his long career, Jim Daniels focuses on Detroit and other Rust Belt cities, where issues of class and race and justice play out in the streets and kitchens and backyards and garages of the Americans trying to live and make a living there. Known for his courage, clarity, and accessibility, Daniels examines the tension between our idealized country and the messier cultural and economic divides, often focusing on those who can’t afford or have access to “magic.”
176 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 1, 2026
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About the author
Jim Daniels
77 books22 followersJames 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 27, 2025
Tonight it’s Warren on the brain, the dangling muffler of what we left behind. Bullets in the bottles calling our names. from Can’t Sleep by Jim Daniels
I was so moved by these poems, the earlier ones about growing up in Warren, a blue collar city just north of Detroit.
My family, like the author’s, worked for the auto industry, some on the line, others as engineers. And his poem My Father Worked 800 Hours of Overtime grabbed me. My dad took all the overtime he could, but he was a mechanic and his work was not as physically taxing as a line worker’s. Daniels writers that his dad’s hobby was “Staying alive. Stranded in the rush hour of his own life.”
…that’s the way it was on our street of the hard luck and the harder…” from Up on Blocks by Jim Daniels
Daniel’s memories of a rough, blue collar childhood is raw and unvarnished, confessional, his childhood world in Warren vivid in its details.
His mother, a nurse, walked to work “down the dirt path behind Arco Tool & Die, a narrow strip of weeds someone forgot to develop between 8 Mile and the cinderblock wall where out subdivision began.” His family worked the same jobs for decades; “We do not look for new jobs. We take what they give us.”
In Homeless Suite, Daniels ponders the dismantling of a homeless encampment, how the city was discussing building tiny houses for them, how more attention was given to saving an abandoned guinea pig than to the homeless. He ends, “All I know is that we all live in tiny houses. God help us.”
He writes about aging, dying parents living in Sterling Height, where in the 60s my uncle bought a brand new house not far from where our son now lives. He writes about his children when young and how we “shut up and do love’s dirty work for them.” Work and retirement. Violence, guns, death. A stray dog wandering into a laundromat and dirtying a woman’s clean clothes. Depression, alcohol, and how poetry saved him.
I am so glad to have finally discovered this poet.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.
I was so moved by these poems, the earlier ones about growing up in Warren, a blue collar city just north of Detroit.
My family, like the author’s, worked for the auto industry, some on the line, others as engineers. And his poem My Father Worked 800 Hours of Overtime grabbed me. My dad took all the overtime he could, but he was a mechanic and his work was not as physically taxing as a line worker’s. Daniels writers that his dad’s hobby was “Staying alive. Stranded in the rush hour of his own life.”
…that’s the way it was on our street of the hard luck and the harder…” from Up on Blocks by Jim Daniels
Daniel’s memories of a rough, blue collar childhood is raw and unvarnished, confessional, his childhood world in Warren vivid in its details.
His mother, a nurse, walked to work “down the dirt path behind Arco Tool & Die, a narrow strip of weeds someone forgot to develop between 8 Mile and the cinderblock wall where out subdivision began.” His family worked the same jobs for decades; “We do not look for new jobs. We take what they give us.”
In Homeless Suite, Daniels ponders the dismantling of a homeless encampment, how the city was discussing building tiny houses for them, how more attention was given to saving an abandoned guinea pig than to the homeless. He ends, “All I know is that we all live in tiny houses. God help us.”
He writes about aging, dying parents living in Sterling Height, where in the 60s my uncle bought a brand new house not far from where our son now lives. He writes about his children when young and how we “shut up and do love’s dirty work for them.” Work and retirement. Violence, guns, death. A stray dog wandering into a laundromat and dirtying a woman’s clean clothes. Depression, alcohol, and how poetry saved him.
I am so glad to have finally discovered this poet.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.
January 5, 2026
Late Invocation for Magic is a collection of both new and selected poems by Jim Daniels. To me, the pieces here read more like compressed essays than poems, with less of the musicality, lyricism, and startling use of language that I tend to look for in my poetry. That said, we each enter our reading with our own definitions, schematics, and preferences, so I wouldn’t make much of that unless you’re specifically looking for more traditional or more formal structured poetry. In any case, my view of these as more essayistic than poetic certainly isn’t a complaint, as I found this collection to be consistently strong throughout.
Focused on the rust belt of a town just outside Detroit (the 8 Mile area of Eminem fame) and its hard-scrabble, blue-collar, post-auto industry existence, there’s a wonderful mix of grittiness, poignancy, justified anger, and nostalgia here which is often quite moving and feels wholly individualized to the speaker even as it’s easy to generalize to the larger population in the area as well without degenerating into “Joe Lunchbox in Anytown USA”.
That unique-to-this-speaker feeling comes about via the confessional tone of many of these, the honesty with regards to moments of thievery, drug use, embarrassment, etc., and the precision of detail. Another particular strength in these pieces, one that struck me again and again and again, are the killer endings so many close with. As in “Brushing teeth with my sister after the wake”, which details the titular act following the death of the speaker’s mother, ending with “We may never brush our teeth together again. No mirror down here to see our haggard faces. We rinse, we spit. As we were taught.” The combination of the sense of looking ahead to future loss (when will we be together like this ever), bemoaning past loss (the childhood when such an occurrence was a regular event) is made even more powerful by the stark reentry of the mother who taught them.
In “French Omelet,” the speaker references a trip his parents made to visit him in France, and how, with regard to his mother, “All she wanted was a French omelet. Out of season/the small restaurants nearby were closed. I myself did not know what made an omelet French.” Eventually, they found a place and “She refused to be disappointed with their small, modest lives, their ordinary children. She was in France! Eating an omelet! So light she had to keep it from floating away with her fork.” No, in present time, the speaker “can see that full yellow plate in front of her” and how “She ate it for the rest of her life.” Time and again these pieces end with that sort of gut punch, so that I had to pause and let the impact linger over me before moving on to the next poem.
Finally, another element I appreciated was the way people, images, and moments echoed throughout: the speaker’s mother obviously, but also a girl who died tragically young, the speaker’s father, a rubber ball, magic, stars. These repetitions both unify the collection and also emphasize its nostalgic nature and the way such moment reverberate throughout our lives even decades later.
As mentioned, these pieces were not quite what I was expecting when I picked up this book, but they quickly won me over and, in the end, this was one of my favorite poetry reads in the past year and a great way to start off 2026. Highly recommended.
Focused on the rust belt of a town just outside Detroit (the 8 Mile area of Eminem fame) and its hard-scrabble, blue-collar, post-auto industry existence, there’s a wonderful mix of grittiness, poignancy, justified anger, and nostalgia here which is often quite moving and feels wholly individualized to the speaker even as it’s easy to generalize to the larger population in the area as well without degenerating into “Joe Lunchbox in Anytown USA”.
That unique-to-this-speaker feeling comes about via the confessional tone of many of these, the honesty with regards to moments of thievery, drug use, embarrassment, etc., and the precision of detail. Another particular strength in these pieces, one that struck me again and again and again, are the killer endings so many close with. As in “Brushing teeth with my sister after the wake”, which details the titular act following the death of the speaker’s mother, ending with “We may never brush our teeth together again. No mirror down here to see our haggard faces. We rinse, we spit. As we were taught.” The combination of the sense of looking ahead to future loss (when will we be together like this ever), bemoaning past loss (the childhood when such an occurrence was a regular event) is made even more powerful by the stark reentry of the mother who taught them.
In “French Omelet,” the speaker references a trip his parents made to visit him in France, and how, with regard to his mother, “All she wanted was a French omelet. Out of season/the small restaurants nearby were closed. I myself did not know what made an omelet French.” Eventually, they found a place and “She refused to be disappointed with their small, modest lives, their ordinary children. She was in France! Eating an omelet! So light she had to keep it from floating away with her fork.” No, in present time, the speaker “can see that full yellow plate in front of her” and how “She ate it for the rest of her life.” Time and again these pieces end with that sort of gut punch, so that I had to pause and let the impact linger over me before moving on to the next poem.
Finally, another element I appreciated was the way people, images, and moments echoed throughout: the speaker’s mother obviously, but also a girl who died tragically young, the speaker’s father, a rubber ball, magic, stars. These repetitions both unify the collection and also emphasize its nostalgic nature and the way such moment reverberate throughout our lives even decades later.
As mentioned, these pieces were not quite what I was expecting when I picked up this book, but they quickly won me over and, in the end, this was one of my favorite poetry reads in the past year and a great way to start off 2026. Highly recommended.
January 3, 2026
Thank you Netgalley and Jim Daniels for sending me this advance review copy for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily.
This was an interesting one.
It didn't feel like poetry to me, but instead felt like sitting on the porch catching up on family and neighborhood stories. It reminds me of doing this with my grandparents whenever we visited. There was a fantastic mix of happy and sad stories, and I enjoyed how well written everything was. It really felt like having a conversation, instead of just reading a bunch of poems. You got to know the little bits of history for so many people here.
Overall a fantastic read, and full of depth and history.
This was an interesting one.
It didn't feel like poetry to me, but instead felt like sitting on the porch catching up on family and neighborhood stories. It reminds me of doing this with my grandparents whenever we visited. There was a fantastic mix of happy and sad stories, and I enjoyed how well written everything was. It really felt like having a conversation, instead of just reading a bunch of poems. You got to know the little bits of history for so many people here.
Overall a fantastic read, and full of depth and history.
January 19, 2026
A powerful book of poetry and a good accompaniment to Daniels' memoir, "An Ignorance of Trees." It contains many of the same themes, plus "Invocation" gets into his more recent family life. The poems that resonated with me most were the ones about his children. There's "If You Ever Have to Do This Yourself," which is about repairing a toy his daughter won at a school carnival. Although humorous, it ends with the advice: "Shut up and do love's dirty work." And "Last night I drove my son home," where a father and teenage son are trapped on a car ride together. It describes their perilous tightrope of conversation. Many a parent has been there! A wonderful collection.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews