A Plumber’s Guide to Light

by Jesse Bertron

A Plumber’s Guide to Light is a love letter to the building trades and to the people who work them. This book is populated by people who think they will be saved by work and by those who know they won’t. It looks at the fragile seam that runs between the job site and the home, about the ways that family and work bleed into one another. If you have ever watched tract homes metastasize an open field, and wondered how a single cell of that development might look if smeared across a slide, try A Plumber’s Guide to Light.

Genres: Poetry

36 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2021

About the author

Jesse Bertron is a plumber’s apprentice living in Austin, Texas. He has an MFA in poetry from Vanderbilt University. He is co-director of Poetry at Round Top, an annual festival in rural Texas.

Reviews

[Elizabeth Wolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful collection, straight to the heart of folks who don’t usually read poetry. Equally eloquent about the crew on the jobs and the mom losing her memory. I’ll take away a lot from this, and hope never to buy a house built on a Friday (although the pivot from that to the Bible was a master class in poetry).

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love all of the Rattle chapbooks, including my own.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn good. This collection is full of shit, humanity, and love. “Shorty” and “Cave Paintings in the Port-o-Can” are my particular faves. But they’re all good.

[Jennifer deBie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A small, stunning collection by an incredible poet whose work I will look for in the future.

Full of small wonders and details to make your spine itch, look out for the texture of "Dust" and the delicious ache of the titular "A Plumber's Guide to Light".

A Plumber's Guide to Light is another true gem out of the Rattle Chapbook Series, and heralds Bertron as one to watch, both on the Texas poetry scene, and the wider world too.

[Mollie Jackman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in one sitting while the plastic wrapping was still on the floor. I can't say I've ever read a more raw/real collection - or any other poem I would have sent to my carpenter brother-in-law. True to what I think his experience has been like in the trade, it's really about the people.

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like other Rattle Chapbook Prize winners of the last few years, this one gets five stars from me. It might seem odd for plumbers to be the focus of a poetry book, but it’s even wilder that this is the second poetry book I’ve read about plumbing. At first I thought it would be just a light and fun read. But, of course, most poets have a surprise up their sleeves. Plumbing and experiences with his work crews were just the idea sparks for Bertron, a plumber’s apprentice with an MFA.

There’s a lot of humor, mostly the self-deprecating kind:

“I was always swarming in and out with a hammer, marring something,
and because you’d worked with me you knew that it would not
get better.”

From “What I Have Learned about Marriage,” although this comment was not directed at a wife or partner, but at Conner Finn,

“…you were my neighbor and my boss,
you pried me from the graveyard shift at the hotline
where I was competent and wore pajama pants,
and made me your helper and allowed me to drive nails…”

Bertron’s portraits of others hold a mirror up to him:

“Luis Gerardo hates it, hates the waiting.
Doing nothing makes him nervous.
Doing nothing is the only thing we do

that I am better at than him.”
(from “The Old Ways”)

Through these poems about his work crews and members of his family, Bertron’s real topics are psychology, empathy, and the meaning of life, and, of course, that people are people no matter where they come from or what they do for a living.

“…on the jobsite radio, there’s ballads
about loving the person you have married
or about how your work is difficult but yours –
none of it music I would choose! –

and when I’m wedged beneath a vanity, sawzalling
a ventpipe that some roofer has pissed into
so stale urine sprays onto my cheeks,
I like to stop and listen to that music….”
(from “A Plumber’s Guide to Light”)

[Courtney Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

My dad was a brick mason and carpenter among other things, and my brother worked as a teen with a family friend building houses. Occasionally, I was allowed to help on the job, so these poems resonated on many levels for me as a blue collar kid in Texas. The poems in this chap respectfully capture the complicated nature and beauty of such work and the people who do it while revealing the intimacy and vulnerability we're all capable of. The speaker relays how a love without judgement, which includes family, is possible, how we always have something to learn, even when it's our limitations or a realization of what we can't know.

[N · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this slim little chapbook of sensitive poems that are comprised of inner monologues that establish central ideas of what it's like to be part of the working class. Mr. Berton writes of the mundane, the ordinary and the tragicomic. Standouts include "Cave Paintings in the Port O-Can" which depicts what goes through the mind of various custodial and construction workers as they sit in the toilet, describing the scribblings of childish musings, penis drawings, and all turn into a sad myriad of how people reach out through this type of vandalism. "There was No Assignment, But There Will be a Test" is a touching and sweet poem about wishing what it'd like to be a dad, as the speaker reads to his friend's son, "someday, I'm going to give someone I love someone like you". We should all be so lucky if someone one can describe their love for us in that same, unfussy, straightforward and affecting way.

[Cmelinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This author really put himself out there with being vulnerable, to let us into his world, of life,work and religion,with a bit of humor. One of the one's that stood out to me was SLOP. I just thought he really put that in there. You know when something is funny but not funny and you laugh anyways. The openness of one's life put on display, whether good or bad with no shame. It's liberating to show others were all human,as we walk this journey called life.

[Karen Moulton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book of poetry. "Dust" is a favorite with its "chuck-will's-widow", "caliche road", and "castrato with his moonstruck arias." The poems are specific but universal--that so-hard-to-achieve concept in poetry. Bertron does it. And while I'm pretty handy at fixing the toilet, I'm no plumber. Yet, these poems spoke to me, made me cry. If you are like me, you'll be dog-earring and highlighting the pages in A Plumber's Guide to Light.

[Kelly M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and absolutely stunning. Jesse Bertron is a master of the poetic turn. Gorgeous surprises on every page. Real observations of a real life with wonderful leaps of imagination. What more can we ask of a poet?

[Emily]

Honest, refreshingly accessible, and clever.

[Sandra L L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an easy read, I love that. And the poems are real without the normal pretentiousness of poetry. I’m not a fan of crudity, but the language here is perfect for what’s being said. I especially like “Orientation”.

“But I believe in the body and the mind, that if you’re good enough, and fast,

and if nobody fucks with you, they’ll speak to one another.”

I guess I never thought much about plumbers but now I will.

[Tom C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

We need a lot more poetry like this that unflinchingly addresses real life. We need a lot less hoity toity poetry by people with trust funds who are embracing the latest fashionable nonsense. From start to finish these poems are honest, beautifully constructed, and loving. This is a poet that I'll be following. I can't wait to see what he does next.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you make poems out of construction work? Easy, if you’re Jesse Bertron. He takes us to the job site, introducing us to co-workers like Jacob and Shorty and terms like slop, solder and port-o-can aka shitter. He shares truths, the imperfections allowed to slide, the fact that work done on Fridays may be rushed to get to the weekend, the quiet moments when men who don’t even know each other’s last names share the secrets that keep them awake at night. He says a lot in a few words. In “Arc,” he writes about his father: “he learned four names for sheetrock mud,/that nails measure in pennies by their length,/and if he went to bars he could say Rusty Nail/until the words corroded in his mouth/and still they’d bring him scotch.” “You shouldn’t ask a hammer/to act like a baseball bat”. But you can be a plumber and a poet, too. Bertron, who has an MFA in poetry, works as a plumber’s apprentice in Austin Texas.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 5 out of 5]

A chapbook of poems about life, love, loss, being a plumber, sorrow, and hope.

from Shorty: "Here is a question about love. / No, it's about my boss. / No, love—forget what I said. // How do you speak about a man / who you watch all day long, bringing him / bouquets of wrenches"

from Slop: "Never buy a house build on a Friday, is something Jacob said / on a Friday, as he walked away from a bad solder. // The human race: built on a Friday! / That's what Genesis says—a book of the Bible that I love, / starring as it does an expert working at the speed // that may invite disaster."

from Dust: "my mother told my sister // that before her mind got worse, / she would end her life. // So I was surprised, my mother telling me tonight / that having dreaded it so long, // the loss of her memory had come as a kind of peace. / She wasn't keeping anything from me. // She forgot. It's good to be able to forget / you have decided to die."

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

(After I read this I wrote these notes on the inside back cover -- meant, I think, to help me write a review:)

the world
the exclamations bursting out
expertise / apprentice
& the whole thing gaining momentum, me loving each poem more than the last
(how is this?)
Godamn Allen Fucking G., hitting on *everyone*
I was a woman carpenter's apprentice in SF and it was weird. I'm grateful this wasn't about gender. Since it wasn't about gender, it could go farther [into the apprentice relationship]. It did.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sent me way back to my days in construction growing up in a family of bricklayers. Thus the people, the images were old familiar friends. Made me wish that I had written more of my own experience while it was happening.

These are casual poems, almost story like in the telling. A style well suited to the subject matter.

[Brittany Mishra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection of poems that peered into the mind and work of a plumber's apprentice. There is philosophy and wisdom in every trade and craft and I love the poet was brave enough to share with us the people he's met, the work he does, all wrapped up in life and finding a place on earth where you fit.

[Krystal Zwiesineyi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking. This is art. All of these poems took a hammer to the glass wrapping of delusion, insincerity and self-importance that usually cushions us. It was a tremendous read from the most grounded and alive author.

[Josh Guilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad, very readable.

[Nicholas Trandahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unexpected and refreshing voice in contemporary poetry! Gritty, true, and clear.

[Spencer Szwalbenest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful little chapbook. The finale, “Arc”, is an absolute gem!

[Matt Casas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got this chapbook thru Rattle and it’s one of the best I’ve ever read. Love the humor and real subject matter, definitely relatable if you have any working class manual labor background.