| Shut
Up Shut Down
Reviews
James Laughlin Award Finalist
Minnesota Book Award Finalist
Balcones Poetry Prize Finalist
New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
New York Times Book Review:
“Mark Nowak sifts his sources from history: all five of the verse and prose-poem sequences in Shut Up Shut Down concern labor unions or unemployment, and all five weave real or imagined interviews together with excerpts from other documents . . . The best segments make ‘Memorials / of the materials’ from which laid-off miners, air traffic controllers or clerks have tried to make lives.”
Lisa Jarnot:
“If you like Bob Dylan’s ‘North Country Blues’ and Charles Olson’s Maximus, then this is the book for you.”
Labor History:
“Shut Up Shut Down is investigative analytical poetics at its best. . . . This is a book that should be read widely, not just by poetry enthusiasts and those interested in contemporary avant-garde writing, but also by on-the-ground labor organizers, workers of all stripes, and the many culture workers who are grappling with the emergent post-smokestack economy in the United States.”
Poetry Project Newsletter:
“A weighty contribution to the accomplishments and potential of poetry.”
The Corresponder:
“Full of passion.”
Constant Critic:
“Striking, powerful, and innovative.”
Publishers Weekly:
“A provocative narrative of disenfranchisement.”
Midwest Book Review :
“An impressive and strongly recommended collection of poetic plays and photo-documentary poems exposing the human cost of globalization and deindustrialization.”
David Roediger:
“Elegant and inventive . . . Songs and statistics mix promiscuously in verses deeply informed by a knowledge of labor history and an ear for working class speech. This is a work as powerful in its hope as in its indictment of misery.”
Rodrigo Toscano:
“Shut Up ShutDown’s carefully textured narratives are not of the ‘recovery’ variety, but rather are born of a bold projection of a class’s needs and desires. Ethnographic insight and methodology is coupled with contemporary techniques of narrative sampling (with all the funkiness that comes with it). The result is a strident constructivist aesthetics that dares to speak to its own of a democratic vision.”
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