General Motors

by Ryan Eckes

General Motors is a book of chase scenes for a film without cars, lyric essays that depart from subways never built, and poems for walking off the job. Waking up in the arena of an abandoned public, the spectators are no longer spectators. In Philadelphia, a city built and un-built by capitalism, Ryan Eckes peels apart illusions of individual escape and pieces together a reality in which love means a common refusal of the neoliberal fantasy we’re expected to live in.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Wendy Trevino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Someone should really put a photo of the book cover up here in goodreads.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"we're doing unpaid work in the courtroom while temple university's lawyer / attacks us for being poor. his tongue is a wet dollar. you have no power, he says, / it says so right here in this poem you didn't write. therefore, you should have no power-- / you can just go home. but we just sit there and we can't be fired for just sitting / there, for being a poet, for being a union."
....
"and we stand there and watch the provost choke and choke and then, finally, die. then, on his / forehead, we write a big fucking F."

fist pumping in public while reading this poem. whew.

[Gianni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memo for labor: “you cannot separate the job from the house from the rent from the earth from the food from the healthcare from the water from the transit from the war from the schools from the prisons from the war from the water from the house from the healthcare from the war from the transit from the schools from the food from the job from the prisons from the rent from the earth”

This book is fantastic

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book.

[Finn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I particularly liked the poem aida!

[Tim Cui · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difficult text for someone just dabbling in poetry but enough in there to make my inner geography major happy

[Nick Mehalick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Eckes book "General Motors" is the most important book of poetry for this adolescent century wherein we find ourselves. This teenaged millennia about to leave high school needs to read, and read this.

I've read it everyday for months while my new son fought sleep and in those desperate hours, when I'd begin totalling the hours I'd slept for the week, hoping for double digits but knowing I'd never get there, this book inspired poetry and stories and hope.

With each new century in this country, and this city, it feels like someone hits reset. A yellow fever epidemic, industry and war, an attack. And now, like my grandfather and yours we have to confront what the ones before us fucked up or put off.

I cannot say enough about this book and all the ways in which it's enhanced, and confirmed and changed the ways I see. I won't pull quotes because that's reductive. It's poetry. And you should read it.

[ines · Rating 5 out of 5]

these poemmes stay stuck in my head

[Jaime Fountaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

GENERAL MOTORS is fucking fantastic and it feels like home.

[Cary Stough · Rating 5 out of 5]

if it's not one of the books that we'll memorize a la Fahrenheit 451, it's one whose lines we'll scrawl on the walls of the banks before they fall

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel extremely guilty giving this book its lowest review so far, especially since I liked it - that's what 3 stars means - but I struggled with it a bit.

I absolutely loved parts of it - the poem "Same Time" being my favorite, but on the whole it didn't feel like a whole to me. Does that make sense? It felt a bit all over the place, didn't feel cohesive to me as a book.

I am probably not being entirely fair to it. I liked its themes, I liked its voice, I liked so much that it is very different from a lot of lit being published right now. (It felt a little like the voices of the 90s small press movement at times, but with a more intellectual bent...) At the same time, I just wasn't drawn in to it and had to force myself to return to it at points.

I do feel like I should reread it at some point in the future.

[Josh Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned more about unions and Philadelphia’s forgotten past than any textbook gave me. Eckes’ lambasting of the systems we all exist in is timely for the 21st century of capitalistic toils. A journaling saga of workers’ values, a must read by laborers and academics alike.

[Suryashekhar Biswas · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second part ('Spurs') is a set of poems about city plans which were abandoned, with all kinds of highways and roads that were never built. Even if the rest of the sections weren't as good as they are, one could read the book just for this.

[Beata Fogarasi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A couple standouts - “memo to labor,” which was why I bought this, and the one that starts “why does your milkman whistle in the morning?” - that make this short collection worth it, though a bunch were forgettable. Loved the idea behind Part II too!