Working Classics

From the cannery rows of California to the sweatshops of New York, thisanthology of poems captures the drama of work and working-class life inindustrial America. It speaks of rolling mills, mine shafts, and foundries,and of a people who dig coal, tap blast furnaces, sew shirts, clean fish,and assemble cars. These subjects, though largely absent from literaryanthologies and textbooks, are increasingly evident in the work of contemporarypoets. Working Classics gathers the best and most representativeof these poems, American and Canadian, from 1945 to the present.Included are poems by Antler, Robert Bly, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jim Daniels,Patricia Dobler, Stephen Dunn, Tess Gallagher, Edward Hirsch, David Ignatow,June Jordan, Lawrence Joseph, Philip Levine, Chris Llewellyn, Joyce CarolOates, Anthony Petrosky, Michael Ryan, Gary Soto, Tom Wayman, James Wright,and many others. The result is a diverse and evocative collection of 169poems by 74 poets, nearly a third of them women.