What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People

This galvanizing anthology of poetry and short prose highlights experiences of economic exploitation and finds common ground across the working class. The editors’ introduction contextualizes the anthology within a larger labor movement inspired by the Poor People’s Campaign popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, which was reestablished in 2018 to prioritize the needs of the 140 million poor and low-income people in the U.S. Diverse perspectives capture individual struggles of the immigrants, nonwhite people, and impoverished workers who make society function, as in Sonia Guiñansaca’s poem “America Runs on Immigrants,” which concludes, “America screams Go Back To Your Country, Stop Stealing Our Jobs and simultaneously whines Where is my lunch?” Other poems, such as Curtis Bauer’s “Dispatch Out of a Language I Used to Speak,” illustrate how the body can be consumed in the mechanical processes of labor: “Stories of kids and men if not drowning in grain/ being caught in the center auger and the one outside/ knowing something was wrong before the corn/ stopped coming, by the corn turned red.” Danez Smith puts it succinctly in their poem “C.R.E.A.M”: “what cost more than being American and poor?” This is a memorable and timely book. (Mar.)