Book Forty-Three

Work

Brandon Brown

ISBN: 978-1-891190-43-8
Publication: 2020
Pages: 91

Brandon Brown is the author of several books, most recently The Four Seasons (Wonder) and The Good Life (Big Lucks). He has edited the zines Fuck You Longhair, Dee Dee's Kids, Sleep is the Enemy, Commonweal, OMG!, Celebrity Brush and currently edits Panda's Friend. He lives in the shadows of Albany Hill in El Cerrito, California.

Work is a sustained lyric study of all that happens in between the poet leaving their office at 4:30 in the afternoon on Midwinter's Day, 2018, and returning to it at 7:45 the next morning. The poem studies work through the lens of all that is apparently not-work, worrying the distinctions. The poet, after all, exercises the body, commutes, reads, cooks dinner, watches a film, brushes teeth, rests the body in sleep, elaborately dreams and transcribes, studies, listens. Literal work menaces the atmosphere, warning of its imminent return. But inside of that horror, and the political geography which accommodates its tyranny, there is a lot of pleasure. Smoldering indica, savory squash, saucy dreams, terrific soundtrack. Work joins the tradition of poems which respect the possibilities of a given day, which means, for this poet in this book, about sixteen hours.