Description:
What Things Cost: an anthology for the people is the first major anthology of labor writing in nearly a century. Here, editors Rebecca Gayle Howell & Ashley M. Jones bring together more than one hundred contemporary writers singing out from the corners of the 99 Percent, each telling their own truth of today's economy.
In his final days, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a "multiracial coalition of the working poor." King hoped this coalition would become the next civil rights movement but he was assassinated before he could see it emerge as the Poor People's Campaign, now led by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. King's last lesson--about the dangers of dividing working people--inspired the conversation gathered here by Jones and Howell.
Fifty-five years after the assassination of King, What Things Cost collects stories that are honest, provocative, and galvanizing, sharing the hidden costs of labor and laboring in the United States of America. Voices such as Sonia Sanchez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Silas House, Sonia Guiñansaca, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Victoria Chang, Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald Stern, and Jericho Brown weave together the living stories of the campaign's broad swath of supporters, creating a literary tapestry that depicts the struggle and solidarity behind the work of building a more just America.
Brief description: Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer and documentary photographer. Currently, she is on the creative writing faculty at Morehead State University.
Review Quotes:
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.
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)