Reviews

• Item was as described.

• This book of poems is more than a book. It is a documentary of working class Americans, their hopes, their struggles, their dreams and their philosophy. Levine takes us into the bowels of humanity, stirring up imagery of depression, somber moods, and poverty. His poems are rich and yet simple. I particularly liked "The Grave" and how he begins with the cars passing by an ordinary grave, and we learn that it is the narrator's grave. Then he zooms into the life of the narrator, his loves, his lifestyle, and philosophy saying that nothing was real. By the end of the poem we zoom back out, zipping past the grave filled with dirt. Levine likes to use repetition in his poems, which gives it a wonderful rhythm. I recommend this book highly to not only poetry lovers, but people interested in learning more about life.

• This is an excellent book. I admire Mr. Levine’s work very much.

• It seems that many people in reviewing or talking about this collection characterize it as a series of poems about work, and about the factories and plants in which Levine worked for many years, and they claim that this collection more than any other by Levine meditates on these places and experiences in his life. That is not the case at all. It's true, many of Levine's poems are about work and working people, about their toughness and their tenderness. However, we tend to talk about Levine as if he wrote about work the way Bukowski wrote about drinking and women. Many of Levine's poems are about other things besides work. Here there are poems about graves, about ominous chalkboards, about racism, about childhood, about Jewish identity, about perfecting a strike against a dusty punching bag. Levine is one of the greatest poets of twentieth century America, and to reduce him to somebody who jsut wrote about work in the strictest sense is reductive. As the title poem demonstrates, Levine wrote about work in its widest and most human definition: the labor of compassion and humility.

• Back in 2015, I jumped on the Philip Levine wagon for the first time with his Pulitzer winning "The Simple Truth" (1994). I wasn't wowed by that volume but decided to go back in time to his National Book Award winning "What Work Is" (1992) before giving up on finding the Philip Levine I'd encountered in anthologies through the years. It was a good move. At first, flipping through it and seeing long columns of unbroken text, I thought this might be a slog to get through, but that was not the case. I felt like I was stepping into a story each time I started a poem and each one carried me along. It was a surprisingly fast read and it's a volume I could see rereading, especially the long poem "Burned." My only regret is that I was afraid of being burned myself by another volume of poetry I might not like and bought a used copy with signs of mildew, so I'll be buying a new copy to put with my keepers. To get a feel for the poetry in this book, check out Levine's poems "What Work Is" and "Burned," a 20 page poem, at the Poetry Foundation.

Purchase links