num_pages: 77
description: 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
language: English
title: What Work Is: Poems
titlecomplete: What Work Is: Poems
genres: Read For School, American, Literary Fiction, School, Poetry, Labor, Adult, Classics, Nonfiction, Contemporary
ratings_count: 2351
awards: awardedAt: 662716800000
name: National Book Award
category: Poetry, awardedAt: 662716800000
name: California Book Award
category: Poetry (Silver), awardedAt: 662716800000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Poetry, awardedAt: 662716800000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Poetry
publisher: Knopf