Edited by the Land and Labour Poetry Collective,
Fernwood Publishing, 2025
It’s been over 30 years since Paperwork, the last of Tom Wayman’s classic trio of work poetry anthologies, and there’s been a dearth of such books until now. That gap in time, note the editors of I’ll Get Right On It, “coincided with the ascendency and dominance of neoliberal governments, markets and ideologies that have promoted individualism and market-based solutions while eroding unions, communities of care and solidarity among working people.” Things haven’t become more secure for workers. And climate change has made things worse. The editors—a collective of six poets that includes Moni Brar, Jenna Butler, Samantha F. Jones and Kelly Shepherd from Alberta—sent out a call for poems “about what it’s like to do your job (paid or unpaid), make a living or just get by in our age of climate change and uncertainty.” The resulting anthology, with some 90 contributors, is varied in approach. In “Bitumen Refining and Its Outcomes: A Short Course,” oil sands worker Ross Belot recalls being called a “hero” when he was employed at a mine and then, in retirement, realizing “we were not heroes, I watched/ California burn.” In “988,” suicide crisis line responder Fiona Conway writes of talking to a 13-year-old girl “so afraid of the way/ her breath warms the world.” And yet there is hope. As Ikeoluwapo B. Baruwa writes in “The Advocate,” his poem about working in a chemistry lab:
“…the storms outside
The floodwaters, the rising heat
Are not just nature’s chaos //
Each hazard I find is a reminder
We build the risks we face
But in the building
There is hope for unbuilding, too.”
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Briefly noted by Alberta Views
