Praise for Just Labor

In Just Labor, Laura-Gray Street explores the often-overlooked role of women and femininity in the historical struggle for dignity in work. She treats poetics as a form of labor much like working in the textile industry. The threads connect to create a collection that is personal and historical, abstract and grounded, in the factory, in the home, and as bloody as needlework can be.

—jd hegarty

Introduction to Just Labor

In this remarkable collection, Just Labor, Laura-Gray Street both moves the reader emotionally and provokes her to deeper investigation and understanding. These poems are neither easy nor difficult, each a corporeal entity intimately connected to all the rest. A single working body, if you will. They are the mingling of many voices—mostly those of women—many energies and circumstances, all tapping into the theme of hard work and its multiple consequences in the lives we live. Compassion minus the sentimentality. Metaphor so embedded that it sneaks up on you as insight. The people, the characters, are portrayed with such subtle irony they become truly human before your eyes. These poems reveal the beleaguered bodies of women who work at home to rear their children and in the mill to raise cloth (or clothes, or tampons) out of cotton. The machines themselves are described in such taut, vivid detail that they too almost come to life. Even the cotton takes on living form. And just when you’ve got the book figured out, a voice arises to lay down some fast-talking, socio/political wit that makes your head spin faster than a bobbin—the maimings, the deaths, the violence resulting from union strikes, the bloated lives of mill owners. There are many poems in this collection that will slay you—and not gently—then make you beg for more, that will break your heart, reveal some necessary but difficult truth at the core of who and what we are, and otherwise wake you up from the stupor of your daily trance. Mingling the language of the cotton mill and its machines with the language of desperate love and longing, Street reveals the harsh yet beautiful lives of women working in the unjust conditions of the mills, the earthy ebb and flow of their exhausted bodies. This is just some of the best damn writing I’ve encountered anywhere. The language throughout is simultaneously compressed and sharp, cutting and repairing as it goes. But we will never completely heal from the images and stories of this amazing collection. Nor should we.

—Jim Peterson, author of Towheaded Stone Thrower