Work Lunch: Poems, by Lee Bains
G&G contributing editor John T. Edge says, “In Work Lunch, Lee Bains writes about the broken South he knows and loves, and the hard working people who are piecing it back together, patching sheet rock, nailing boards, sharing communion in gas station parking lots. ‘Jamaican Place,’ ‘Vietnamese Place,’ ‘Meat and Threes’—this is poetry for the people, sustenance for the beloved, wrought in Birmingham and Atlanta, told in the gaps between work and home, rich and poor.” Contributing writer Russell Worth Parker concurs: “When I first met Lee Bains at Tallahassee, Florida’s Word of South Literary and Music Festival, I already knew and loved his music, a sometimes whispered, sometimes roared, but always unflinchingly honest tour through Southern church revivals, punk shows, and honky-tonks, guided by a working man with a historian’s understanding, a deacon’s gentleness, and a revolutionary’s zeal. Thus, I am unsurprised to be equally enamored of Bains’s poetry. He lives what he writes, working as an Atlanta handyman when he’s not touring, “dog tired, and labor whipped.” Bains’s authentic vision gives insight into the diversity and complexity of the ever-changing South and her people; our culture and our lives; through food, our lingua franca. And like any good Southern table, Bains’s work will leave you both full and wanting more.”
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