Variations of Labor

by Alex Gallo-Brown

Alex Gallo-Brown explores through poetry, essays, and fiction what it means to labor in modern-day America. Stories about semiprofessional poker players, line cooks in high-tech company cafeterias, and an activist trying to drum up support for a union paint a bleak picture of dead-end jobs and truncated hopes, but also depict the roiling just underneath the surface of all those who have been disrespected and written off.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published September 3, 2019

About the author

Alex Gallo-Brown is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist based in Seattle. He is the author of The Language of Grief (2012), a self-published collection of poems, and Variations of Labor (Chin Music Press, 2019), a collection of poems and stories. Called “the poet of the service economy” by author and critic Valerie Trueblood, he has been awarded the Barry Lopez Fellowship from Seattle's Hugo House, the Walthall Fellowship from Atlanta's WonderRoot, and the Emerging Artist Award from the City of Atlanta. He holds degrees in writing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Gallo-Brown's essays, articles, poems, stories, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications, including Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Salon.com, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Stranger, Fanzine, Vice's Motherboard, Poetry Northwest, Crosscut, The Oregonian, City Arts, Seattle Review of Books, and Pacifica Literary Review. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter, where he works as a union organizer.

Reviews

[Wendy Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a worker once.
Lent my labor to
the appetites of mass.
Like a caged animal,
my master said,
beautiful, self-contained.
Only once was I asked to sacrifice
the fingers of my left hand
which I gave willingly
and mostly without regret.
I could follow
my master's reasoning.
I was sympathetic
to her plight.
The company had
its own hunger.
We all would
have to give.

A mix of prose and poetry about work, unions, capitalism, race. Beautiful.

[Lonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a poem in this book called "What I Have Become" that really articulates the struggle that is white identity in late American capitalism.  He pairs lyrical episodes with snippets of historical analysis to recreate the subjective experience of white identity formation.  The poem traces the process by which the Italian (and the speaker) became white.  Besides being an excellent political expression, it's a really good poem.

The last poem in the book, In a Starbucks on My Thirty, made me weep.

[Morgan Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you:

- Live in Seattle
- Or have ever lived in Seattle
- Or work now anywhere in the USA
- Or have ever worked anywhere in the USA

You should read this book of poetry and short stories.

I guarantee you will find people and situations you recognize in these pieces, unless you're a trust fund baby.

Recommended.