Mark Wallace; Temporary Worker Rides a Subway

Series No.: 110

ISBN: 1-931243-60-3, Pages: 152

American Literature, Poetry

Winner of the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award

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In two long poems of comic outrage, Mark Wallace explores and questions contemporary language surrounding money, work, and the degree to which these provide reasonable measures of the value of people’s lives.

The first, “Boys at the Guns,” turns the language of high finance into an Edward Lear–like poetry that breaks down narrative coherence and revels in the irrational nonsense of money. “Boys” concerns the November 1998 leveraged buy-out (LBO) of the RJR Nabisco Corporation, at the time the largest LBO in history and perhaps the high point of the Wall Street and corporate environment of the 1980s that profoundly changed American culture.

The second, “Temporary Worker Rides a Subway,” turns away from the financial elite to focus instead on the financially marginal temporary worker, shuttled from job to job like a deployable resource.

Wallace’s poetry becomes a way of responding to the kinds of language that attempt to turn human beings into products at the cost of their self-respect and autonomy.