Living Wages: Poems - Softcover

Stitching a seam. Sweeping a floor. Coming into first light after working the midnight shift in a factory. These are small moments in everyday jobs, but such moments can glint with a light that is anything but ordinary. The poems in LIVING WAGES seek that light. In his ninth book, Michael Chitwood describes physically hard, sometimes dangerous labor, but also of quiet housekeeping chores and office routines. We call this "making a living," the day-to-day way that we get through our lives and pay for the roof over our heads. Whether going to the cellar for a jar of pickles or drilling a dynamite hole to clear rock for a house's foundation, we construct our lives. Chitwood's seventh book of poems interrogates and celebrates work as a kind of translation, whereby what we do links us to the past and becomes our present and future. Here is praise, as Gerard Manley Hopkins says, for all our gear and tackle.

Michael Chitwood has worked on a construction crew, in a textile mill, and for a highway department; he is also the author of seven volumes of poetry and two books of essays, including three published by Tupelo Press: LIVING WAGES: POEMS (2014), POOR-MOUTH JUBILEE (2010), and SPILL (2007). Having graduated from the only high school in rural Franklin County, Virginia, he earned a BA in English at Emory & Henry College and went on to work for the University of Virginia Medical Center as a science writer and editor for Helix magazine, meanwhile earning an MFA. For a number of years, he was a science writer and editor at Duke University Medical Center and Research Triangle Institute; he is now a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.