91桃色

"In her debut poetry collection, I Was Working, Ariel Yelen composes with the strangled chords of the contemporary workplace a fresh kind of music. . . . Yelen’s poems convincingly render the drone, distraction, and seething frustration of that chthonic bargain the modern creative has to make: holding a day job."鈥擜ustin Adams, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"A pleasing first collection. . . . all the poems here offer thoughtful observation and serious consideration. . . . [I Was Working is] both highly original and shamelessly entertaining. There鈥檚 an informed maturity here, combined with a little playfulness and a good ear, which makes for a quite remarkable debut."鈥擱obert Dunsdon, Colorado Review

“Ariel Yelen’s poetry is exquisitely witty and charming. These poems are intimate etchings of a poet’s daily life under late capitalism. Astutely observed, pleasurable to read, and heartbreakingly relatable, I Was Working is a collection you’ll read and reread.”—Cathy Park Hong, author of Engine Empire and Minor Feelings

“I love poems that impart how poets get by, meaning, what we do for a living. I also love poems that take risks that can only come from lived experiences of risk. In I Was Working, Ariel Yelen lays bare the sly vagaries of late capitalism (would you rather be ‘love-low’ or ‘money-low’?) and offers a way to reinvent our relationships outside the logic of exploitation through authentically living with others. Yelen uses the tension of writing poetry when she has no time to write to create some of the most beautiful ‘work poems’ I have ever read. Her book is no small miracle—it’s so good.”—Stacy Szymaszek, author of Famous Hermits and The Pasolini Book