Customer Reviews

Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job

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I read "Going for Coffee" as part of an English class at the University of Regina. Although I am not a big fan of poerty, I was intrigued and sympathetic to many of the poems compiled within this anthology.

In his introduction, Tom Wayman states that accurate representaions of work are rarely treated in television, movies, and novels. He goes on to show that this may have been a driving force for the 93 authors contained within this book to write about their own, "accurate, insider's" experience of work. My class and I analysed many of the rewarding, disgusting, hilarious, and humiliating situations and feelings portrayed through these poems and found accurate detail, a full range of human emotion, and relation to the jobs we have worked. I found myself thinking, "I know how he feels," while reading many of these poems.

"Going for Coffee" is an excellent anthology of poetry spanning a diverse spectrum of the labour market: paid or unpaid; assembly line workers, oil riggers, doctors, managers, teachers, farmers, housewives and more. This books has something for just about everyone and I would recommend it for both academic and personal reading.