Works and Days

The prolific Mayer (Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words) gives a nod to Hesiod as she meticulously and humanistically deliberates on the ways that various environments—including the natural, political, and economic—influence the personal. The collection is constructed around a series of first-person meditations, reminiscent of diary entries, that document the indecisiveness of modern weather patterns (“Winter forgot its car keys”) and the waking of the natural world as summer reluctantly arrives (“The peonies start, the fig tree made it. I think it’s raining now, it’s like a misting tent”). Mixed in with the book’s measured documentation of several months are personal lists, bits about tenant protests against landlords from New York state history, jumble puzzles from the daily paper, notes on climate change, and more. In this way the history and present moment of a place gain equal importance. As time passes, Mayer, with characteristic humor, inventive language, and straightforwardness, creates a work that is at once hopeful, anticapitalist, and deeply invested in the personal. Mayer’s poems often juxtapose the concepts of nature and ownership, but nature always wins out: “property is robbery, give everybody/ everything, other birds walk this way too.” (June)