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Sharing Plastic
Sharing Plastic is a gushing homage to each worker who has feared arrest. It is a confrontation to an undiscerning view of migration and whiteness. At times playful while others severe, this hybrid poetry/fiction collection works to lengthen sonic intimacies between unprotected workers by snaking such dialogues or scenarios next to one another as one resonating force.
Different from literature that finds poetic tension between informal trade workers and their bosses, or poems that distantly paint a marginalized worker scenario as dramatic, these episodes hone in on the loving or volatile worker to worker exchanges.
The characters and voices in these vignettes cinematically traverse between El Paso, San Francisco, Oakland and Chicago. In a political time when people are bracing themselves each time they turn on the news, 'Sharing Plastic,' alongside other voices which only know flux, suggests honoring those who have long known how to navigate the temporary.
Different from literature that finds poetic tension between informal trade workers and their bosses, or poems that distantly paint a marginalized worker scenario as dramatic, these episodes hone in on the loving or volatile worker to worker exchanges.
The characters and voices in these vignettes cinematically traverse between El Paso, San Francisco, Oakland and Chicago. In a political time when people are bracing themselves each time they turn on the news, 'Sharing Plastic,' alongside other voices which only know flux, suggests honoring those who have long known how to navigate the temporary.
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First published January 17, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 28, 2018
In Sharing Plastic Blake Nemec is, as a voice says in one of his poems, "speaking of hired hands". This book is a total exploration in form, not only comprises poems, proses, and intervened images, but it also renders the voices of those bodies of work, those hands of labor that we naturally dismiss. It's like us, as readers, become that girl in "Sharing Plastic" we too don't know realness. At all.
What I like the most is that something conversational performed in these pages, we hear workers talk, remember, feel, but it is not what they say what is important, but what they mean. In Sharing Plastic the reader becomes a witness of the rawness and uniqueness of the language of those who don't or won't. The rawness and uniqueness of words that no one seems to listen to anymore.
I truly believe that the stories out of the rooms, rugs, bed sheets, forms, skins, and streets of this book produce a microhistory of labor, a definition of work, and above all, an exercise of identity.
What I like the most is that something conversational performed in these pages, we hear workers talk, remember, feel, but it is not what they say what is important, but what they mean. In Sharing Plastic the reader becomes a witness of the rawness and uniqueness of the language of those who don't or won't. The rawness and uniqueness of words that no one seems to listen to anymore.
I truly believe that the stories out of the rooms, rugs, bed sheets, forms, skins, and streets of this book produce a microhistory of labor, a definition of work, and above all, an exercise of identity.
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December 14, 2019thank you, blake! for your activism and for sharing your words and stories.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews