"I did get 604 dozen two days in a row. As far as I know no one else has ever got that many.
In eight hours. It liked to a killed me."
--from "Pauline on the Bar Tacker"
In eight hours. It liked to a killed me."
--from "Pauline on the Bar Tacker"
|
Praise for Piece Work:
"Charlie, the first-shift foreman at the textile mill, is proud to say, 'What I do means something in this world.' Other workers--Tonisha, Sherry, Jimmy, Bill--could say so too but probably won't. In Piece Work, one of the strongest, most truthful books of poetry I have ever read, Barbara Presnell says it for them, to them, with them, in lines of pure and heartfelt respect. Here are some words--courage, exhaustion, hope, despair, persistence, defiance--never spoken but always profoundly lived. In this fine poet's hands, they are more than words." —Fred Chappell, North Carolina Poet Laureate, 1997-2002 "One does not know which to admire more in this collection--its fierce documentary honesty, or the perfect pitch of its imagined speakers. The two come together memorably in poem after poem, giving us deep and abiding insight into industrial and post-industrial America. This, too, is part of poetry's task: to tell what happened, and why it still matters." —Jared Carter, author of Work, For the Night Is Coming |
In Piece Work, you'll meet Velma, the shrink wrapper, Pauline in sewing, Charlie, the first-shift foreman, Tonisha in knitting, and many more. There are good times--when work is steady and pay is high--and there are bad--when machines are unbolted and shipped to factories in other countries, and, one by one, the workers' jobs are on the line. Piece Work is about what mattered and continues to matter in the working world--the everyday people who keep the place running.
Poems from Piece Work
|
Pauline Learns to Sew
When I come back from having babies they put me on sewing. I could no more sew a straight line than I could milk a chicken but the other ladies helped me, showed me how to set the needle in the cloth to make a turn, pull my thread to the side so it wouldn’t jam up in the bobbin. I won’t say I ever was much good at it, but nobody’d accuse me a not trying. A lifetime, it seems. Husband, three kids growed. Mama passed. Went from t-shirts and boxers to sweat shirts then collars then elastic. One day, outta the blue, they unbolted the machines, loaded them in trucks, hauled ‘em down to Mexico or someplace. Nothing left on second floor but concrete and empty bolt holes. We was like family, us sewers. You’d a thought we lost a brother or sister, the weight we felt, grief tangling up among us. You’d find broke needles in corners for a while after, lengths a thread. Ladies getting old by then just retired. Young ones, they got on somewhere else in the mill, some other machine. Didn’t lose nobody from it, not really. Took our spirit, that’s all. You can work a 8-hour shift without spirit, but it ain’t half worth it, you know? |
"Pauline Learns to Sew" was selected by Our State magazine as one of 10 poems every North Carolinian should read.
|
"The Unwearing: A Benediction" was first published in The Southern Review, Vol. 41, Issue 1
Listen to a reading of "The Unwearing: A Benediction"
|
The Unwearing: A Benediction
Then, at last, when machines shut down, the crank and clatter of their work quiet at this long shift’s end, when the bobbins are empty, whistles have stopped blowing, freight has been loaded on its beds and is gone, when sore backs and burly afternoons behind concrete walls have gone, when all the plants have closed their doors, there will be nothing left but the spinning earth, its tight weave of water and root, soft fabric of morning, each imperfection counted one by one, nothing left but the world’s rhythm, the manufacture of its seasons, nothing but the voices of our ancestors talking above the roar, and then we will take off the cloth and there will be only thread and then not even thread or the need for thread and we will bless each day’s creation, the sweat and rip that wove it, the oily grace that gave it to us, how it feels against our skin. |