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What Work Is

Poems (National Book Award Winner)

Author Philip Levine
Ebook
Knopf
On sale Aug 31, 2011 | 96 Pages | 9780307761958
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Winner of the National Book Award in 1991
 
“This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living ‘at the borders of dreams.’ One reads The Tempest ‘slowly to himself’; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of ‘the dark from the dark.’ What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language.”
—Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal
  • WINNER | 1991
    National Book Awards
© Frances Levine
PHILIP LEVINE was born in 1928 in Detroit and attended Wayne State University. After a succession of industrial jobs, he left the city for good and lived in various parts of the country before settling in Fresno, California, where he taught at the state university until his retirement. He was the author of nineteen previous collections of poetry and was the recipient of two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, among many other honors. He was poet laureate from 2011 until 2012, and served twelve autumns as poet-in-residence at New York University. He died in February 2015. View titles by Philip Levine

About

Winner of the National Book Award in 1991
 
“This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living ‘at the borders of dreams.’ One reads The Tempest ‘slowly to himself’; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of ‘the dark from the dark.’ What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language.”
—Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal

Awards

  • WINNER | 1991
    National Book Awards

Author

© Frances Levine
PHILIP LEVINE was born in 1928 in Detroit and attended Wayne State University. After a succession of industrial jobs, he left the city for good and lived in various parts of the country before settling in Fresno, California, where he taught at the state university until his retirement. He was the author of nineteen previous collections of poetry and was the recipient of two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, among many other honors. He was poet laureate from 2011 until 2012, and served twelve autumns as poet-in-residence at New York University. He died in February 2015. View titles by Philip Levine

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