THE ART OF WORK takes but a moment of our history and offers it up in hopes that we may see more clearly the realities of a segment of working America. Centering around the Meat Cutter's Union of New York City, UFCW Local 342, the poems bear witness to real people, job sites, and stories. They offer new access points into the lives that exist past those solitary moments. This collection does not make art of work, it merely frames the beauty already present in our toiling, our labor, and our survival.
Jen Fitzgerald is a poet, essayist, photographer, and a native New Yorker who received her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University and her BA in Writing at The College of Staten Island (CUNY).
Her essays, poetry, and photography has been featured widely, over the past decade, in venues such as The Nation, PBS Newshour, Tin House, Boston Review, NER, Colorado Review among others.
Her first collection of poetry, "The Art of Work" was published by Noemi Press in September of 2016. It follows the working realities of New York City's Butcher's Union, UFCW Local 342, through job sites on all five boroughs and upstate-intermingling her family's working-class lineage and current lives with those of the documented and undocumented members populating our grocery stores, processing plants, slaughter houses, and agri-farms.
As a community activist and organizer, she has hosted free-for-the-community Grassroots Workshops, created spaces for the literary community to organize outside of academia, hosted podcasts and readings, such as the Trump inauguration "Day One" poetry reading at Poet's House NYC, and has organized the literary community around issues of representation in publishing as Count Director for The VIDA Count, working in tandem with the National Writer's Union to organize at AWP, and started the campaign for Staten Island to name its first ever Poet Laureate.
She works with the organizations "Prison Writes" and "The Kite" to bring writing & literacy workshops to incarcerated youth and adults on Rikers Island and other jails/institutions around NYC. She also teaches public creative writing workshops for NYWW, LitReactor, Split This Rock, and the New York Public Library.
Her new work seeks to bridge the connective gaps left in language while engaging larger concepts of solidarity, singularity, and ascension.
"Jen Fitzgerald describes her collection of poems in the Art of Work as being a collaborative labor. How else could it be with her amazing feel for the world of work and the art she finds in it. Her connection is made primarily through those who labor in the processing, retailing, and serving of animal products. Amongst the workers, many members of the United Food and Commercial Workers, there is story telling which brings you into a world which is tumultuous in images and emotions. The workplace which separates families by long hours, the banality, the seldom appreciated skill, the glimpse of friendship, the ongoing struggle to maintain dignity, the solidarity when it exists presents work life at its toughest. Would that there was more light and message of hope. Perhaps that is the point. The organizing and cries for revolt and emancipation will have to come from our throats."
— Dr. Elaine Bernard
"Jennifer Fitzgerald's bolts of poetic power are increasingly lighting up the night. In this collection, Fitzgerald's poetics sets out to rethread fragmented personal experience, family lore, socio-cultural prohibitions and allowances, in order to bear down on staid notions of labor and the working body. What's achieved is a historical perspective that has both sweep and depth. What's implicitly rejected is an all-too- easy thumbs up 'like' of struggle. Fitzgerald's elevated Intercultural Poetic Competence (IPC), borne of a rigorous examination of the political forces most proximate to her social origins, allows her to radically reframe both speculative and applied knowledges of Solidarity, knowledges long overdue for a retrofitting in the 21st century. Thus, it is not a 'work of art' that intrigues us here, but rather, The Art of Work."
— Rodrigo Toscano
"Louis Zukofsky once wrote that poetry's lower limit was speech and its upper limit was music. Jen Fitzgerald's The Art of Work recalibrates these limits for a contemporary working class poetry whose lower limit here is the killing floor or the garden-level apartment and whose upper limit might be workers' comp or, quite simply, a shift coming to an end. The Art of Work turns this 'history of necessity' into brilliant, tightly honed verse. It should be read across the classes, across the classrooms, in union halls, at literary festivals, and on the picket lines."
— Mark Nowak
