Reviews will be posted as they are received.

Media interested in a review copy may contact the publisher:

Cynthia Lamb, Senior Editor
Carnegie Mellon University Press
5032 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15289-1021
412.268.2861 (phone)
412.268.8706 (fax)
cynthial@andrew.cmu.edu


Reviews for For a Living: The Poetry of Work:

"[This] new anthology . . . challenges the view that work is a less provocative subject than nature, spirituality or even love. . . . For a Living liberates the voices of those we work alongside every day without perhaps really hearing them." - Carol Hymowitz, The Wall Street Journal

"May exert even wider appeal than its twice-reprinted predecessor, not only because of the diversity of occupations represented but also because of the immediacy and aural clarity of the selections." – Booklist

 

Working Classics was featured on National Public Radio's "All Things Condsidered," in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and as a "Noted With Pleasure" book in The New York Times Book Review.

Reviews for Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life:

" A great feast of an anthology. . . . Here is a volume of great diversity, challenge and reward, a Midwestern dark horse of a book whose riches, coming from the coal mines, canneries, sweatshops and factories of the country, compose an unprecedentedly American (and slightly Canadian) experience." - Jessica Greenbaum, The Nation

"Powerful. . . . Reading through the poems they've selected is a searing and unforgettable experience." - Fred Pfeil, Voice Literary Supplement

"Shows us how we might begin to recover and make good use of more of our cultural history if we looked past literary fashion at what really was, and is." - Reginald Gibbons, Chicago Tribune

"A brilliant lament for the deindustrialization of America. An immensely brilliant and moving book." - Julia Stein, American Book Review

"These poems are about work: the hard monotonous kind that changes people for the worse and makes ghosts of them. . . . one hopes at least a few bosses will read them." - David Kirby, Library Journal

"For those who would treasure a dramatic history of American working life, I can recommend no better book this Labor Day than Working Classics." - Harvey Gittler, Industry Week

" Fredrich Engels, in a letter to Margaret Harkness, April 1888, wrote that he and Marx learned more from Balzac's Human Comedy "than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period altogether." I won't go that far, but in Working Classics one can learn a great deal more about the human realities of life in the rust bowl . . . than in a ton of doctoral theses." - Phillip Bonosky, People's Daily World

"Those of us who are teachers should take this book into our classes to show how poetry can explore the meaning of daily work in our lives." - David Demarest, Carnegie Magazine

"A powerful and moving anthology of poems about blue collar work and community in post-World War II America." - John Beverley, Allegheny Socialist

"Here is a book that moves literary change along a little faster, and with lasting resonance and meaning." - Judith Vollmer, Pittsburgh History

"A troubled, moving, and oddly invigorating book, one of the best anthologies I've seen." - Michael McFee, WUNC Radio, Chapel Hill, North Carolina