Living Wages

Chitwood (Poor-Mouth Jubilee), a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, celebrates his working class background and the manual labor that dominated his younger years in his ninth collection. "There are miracles in this world," he writes, "but they are working class, Wednesday morning miracles/ that go mostly unnoticed by priests." Alive in these poems are the miracles of digging sewage lines, axing billboards off their metal legs, and planing wood for shelves and tables. The majority of these poems, carefully described and directly told, hold the reader in the moment of work without rhetorical or figurative escape. Nonetheless, the depictions aren't wanting for nostalgia. In a poem about digging a ditch, the poet seems to long for a time when "you knew where you stood,/ what you had done in a day,/ and what more there was to do." Similarly, Chitwood's poems yearn for the intimacy between men cultivated by these environments, such as the closeness of holding a cage light while his father worked on the car, or the witnessing of a man's unexpected singing in his wood shop: "He swayed a little who never danced,/ the man who was model of how to be a man ." (Oct.)