Street, Laura-Gray / Just Labor: Poems

Mingling the language of the cotton mill and its machines with the language of desperate love and longing, [Laura-Gray] Street reveals the harsh yet beautiful lives of women working in the unjust conditions of the mills, the earthy ebb and flow of their exhausted bodies. . . This is just some of the best damn writing I've encountered anywhere. The language throughout is simultaneously compressed and sharp, cutting and repairing as it goes. But we will never completely heal from the images and stories of this amazing collection. Nor should we. -Jim Peterson, from the Introduction