Work Is Done When We Are Dead

Description:

The Work Is Done When We Are Dead, Jade Wallace's sophomore poetry collection, considers work in all its many forms, with a particular interest in types of labour that are unpaid, underappreciated, or even entirely unrecognized. Wallace's poems, by turns frantic and playful, lyric and experimental, probe at how the diffuse responsibilities we have to ourselves and one another might all be interpreted as kinds of labour, and ask whether that is a fruitful framework for our lives. The Work Is Done When We Are Dead is a collection that is as poetically indulgent as it is urgently existential.

Brief description:

Jade Wallace is a poet, novelist, and literary critic whose books include: two poetry collections, most recently The Work Is Done When We Are Dead (Guernica Editions, 2026); a genderless novel, ANOMIA (Palimpsest Press, 2024); and, three collaborative poetry collections under the name MADE, most recently ZZOO (Palimpsest Press, 2025).

Review Quotes:

Jade Wallace folds the entire workforce of the world - beings who have toiled across vocations, eras, and bodies - into the fluid 'I' of this collection by drawing on reverent poetic dexterity and inexhaustible empathy. The Work Is Done When We Are Dead is an exquisite choreography of diction and syntax, performed by Wallace with ease despite the obvious care-full, worthwhile labour at its heart. Rich reservoirs of consciousness-sparking philosophy on the chronic pressures of 'the grind' in all its forms and farcical symptoms pool across these poems. But Wallace doesn't claim to have some sapient, definitive answer to the question of work's role in our routines, rituals, bodies, and relationships. And they certainly aren't asking to be rewarded for propagating their hard-earned wisdom. This kind of steady, precise poetry only happens when someone does the work of writing, not to make contentment possible, but as an essential organ of it.