Human Resources: Poems

"Do not bother to smile/ for your photo ID / in Human Resources. / In Human Resources / no one has a face," Erin Murphy writes. Yet in this book of documentary poems exploring labor and employment issues, Murphy gives a face and a voice to those who have been marginalized by impersonal-even brutal-working conditions. With subjects ranging from migrant farmers in the Southwest United States to cell phone manufacturers in Shenzhen, China, these persona, erasure, and memoir poems illuminate the human beings behind profits and policies. In "Rana Plaza," a survivor of the Bangladesh factory collapse survives "on rainwater and biscuits / scavenged from the rucksacks of the dead. / Even now she carries / their dust in her mouth." Likewise, readers will carry these speakers' stories long after finishing this compelling and necessary collection.