What do you think?
Rate this book
The Romance of Happy Workers
The Romance of Happy Workers swaggers through a world of cowboys, conquistadors, comrades, and housewives with mock-Russian lyric sequences and Keatsian swoon. Political and iconoclastic, Anne Boyer’s poems dally in pastoral camp and a dizzying, delightful array of sights and sounds born from the dust of the Kansas plains where dinner for two is cooked in Fire King and served on depression ware, and where bawdy instructions for a modern “Home on the Range” Mix a drink of stock
vermouth and the water table.
And the bar will smell of IBP.
And you will lick my Laura Ingalls. In Boyer’s heartland, “Surfaces should be worn. Lamps should smolder. / Dahlias do bloom like tumors. The birds do rise like bombs.” And the once bright and now crumbling populism of Marxists, poets, and folksingers springs vividly back to life as realism, idealism, and nostalgia do battle amongst the silos and ditchweed. Nothing, too, is a
dusk regulating the blankery.
Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,
fill in the metaphorical smell. A poet and visual artist, Anne Boyer lives in Kansas, where she co-edits the poetry journal Abraham Lincoln and teaches at Kansas City Art Institute.
vermouth and the water table.
And the bar will smell of IBP.
And you will lick my Laura Ingalls. In Boyer’s heartland, “Surfaces should be worn. Lamps should smolder. / Dahlias do bloom like tumors. The birds do rise like bombs.” And the once bright and now crumbling populism of Marxists, poets, and folksingers springs vividly back to life as realism, idealism, and nostalgia do battle amongst the silos and ditchweed. Nothing, too, is a
dusk regulating the blankery.
Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,
fill in the metaphorical smell. A poet and visual artist, Anne Boyer lives in Kansas, where she co-edits the poetry journal Abraham Lincoln and teaches at Kansas City Art Institute.
- GenresPoetry
90 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2008
6 people are currently reading
361 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 3, 2008
ONE OF MY FAVORITE NEW BOOKS OF POETRY! I gave a copy to my boyfriend Rich who likes to dislike the conversation of poetry as much as he likes to dislike the conversation of class, especially from such a stance. It wasn't a joke gift, it was a REAL gift, and he realized it soon after he started reading it, saying he couldn't believe how much he was engaged in reading poetry. He hates poetry, which is why it's best we get together for the things we get together for, which has everything to do with poetry in a sense. BUT ANYWAY MY POINT IS THAT THERE'S NO BETTER REVIEW than a review that says someone who HATES poetry LOVES THIS BOOK! Anne Boyer FUCKING RULES! Buy it for those who LOVE poetry, and for those who hate it, because this is the conversion book we've all been waiting to appear!
MOST SINCERELY!
CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
MOST SINCERELY!
CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
April 7, 2008
TRoHW is Kansas on a Five-Year Plan, Sandburgian regional pathos run through the thresher of Brecht. If Circe'd bothered to ask the hog farm “Who Os the Os?” it’d probably desorcel the lyric like this: “Erase great. Erase poet. Erase no.”
October 4, 2014
I honestly don't know what to rate this book. It vacillates in my mind between thrilling word-joy and dull emptiness. Such radically different responses are one of the dangers of writing that has no extractable meaning, that isn't about ideas or thoughts (however much it maps thought patterns); it's like high-wire reading, either you're exquisitely balanced with all experience heightened, or you're broken on the rocks below. There's really no middle ground where one can play mental footsies on a sofa of a dull winter's evening with the poetry's extracted meaning. You're either reading the poems or you're not.
February 11, 2008
Fittingly for the 21st c.: a shift away from the Family Romance to the Political Romance. This book is sassy in its interrogations. I like it.
December 16, 2019
anne boyer is a master. this collection is more timely than ever, it's a scary read. that cabeza de vaca poem 🥵 this is truly just a gift
Read
September 26, 2023EYEconic !!!!
-- yes
Remove >I<. A common tawdry. Who isn't oversaid. Who isn't a
stud in the
lisping tongue or a twenty-pound barbell.
-- yes
Remove >I<. A common tawdry. Who isn't oversaid. Who isn't a
stud in the
lisping tongue or a twenty-pound barbell.
September 27, 2014
This is my third entry in my series of poetry collection reviews having finished Watching the Spring Festival: Poems by Frank Bidart yesterday. Like the others, I had read this previously a few years back.
Two months back I found myself killing time in the Munich airport. An elderly lady sat next to me and saw that I was working on a crossword puzzle out of a British newspaper. In moderately accented English, she started to tell me about being robbed of her papers, and police cameras everywhere, and how she stays at the airport because she is undercover against the governments of Germany and Britain and America because she is exposing their secret agendas. She was very pleasant (albeit schizophrenic), and she just would not go away. Reading this poetry collection is a similar experience. The sounds are fun in an ee cummings manner (at times), but the message is lost in the crazy. The collection pretends that it wants to make a statement or comparison to communism (at least in the opening long poem of the same title as the collection), but ends up just cramming in as many Russian icons as possible: "The Deus ex Machina Puppet Troupe/flew into Leningrad half past noon.//I waited among the Tatars bored/as moons. Woody showed, stinking//of pomegranate, gulag-eating grin./I let him make a bed in my ear.//His rent cost nothing, two dummy rubles/and a half-spent roll of gossamer.//I babushkaed around his breath/100 mornings as if icons were Workers,//poems blocks of ice. My comrades say . . ."
There is a sense of fun here, however. Or possibly a sound of fun, as in her ode to pigs, "Cloven by Cloven:" "I have dined on the deviled, the pickled, the rude:/bacon, baloney, barbecue, maws,//neckbones, ears, feet, knees./I sing the canned and the candied. . . ." Unfortunately, sounding fun and being fun can be two different things in my experience.
Two months back I found myself killing time in the Munich airport. An elderly lady sat next to me and saw that I was working on a crossword puzzle out of a British newspaper. In moderately accented English, she started to tell me about being robbed of her papers, and police cameras everywhere, and how she stays at the airport because she is undercover against the governments of Germany and Britain and America because she is exposing their secret agendas. She was very pleasant (albeit schizophrenic), and she just would not go away. Reading this poetry collection is a similar experience. The sounds are fun in an ee cummings manner (at times), but the message is lost in the crazy. The collection pretends that it wants to make a statement or comparison to communism (at least in the opening long poem of the same title as the collection), but ends up just cramming in as many Russian icons as possible: "The Deus ex Machina Puppet Troupe/flew into Leningrad half past noon.//I waited among the Tatars bored/as moons. Woody showed, stinking//of pomegranate, gulag-eating grin./I let him make a bed in my ear.//His rent cost nothing, two dummy rubles/and a half-spent roll of gossamer.//I babushkaed around his breath/100 mornings as if icons were Workers,//poems blocks of ice. My comrades say . . ."
There is a sense of fun here, however. Or possibly a sound of fun, as in her ode to pigs, "Cloven by Cloven:" "I have dined on the deviled, the pickled, the rude:/bacon, baloney, barbecue, maws,//neckbones, ears, feet, knees./I sing the canned and the candied. . . ." Unfortunately, sounding fun and being fun can be two different things in my experience.
August 29, 2014
"Is love the haunt of flies?"
I loved this. Eerie-farm poems, heavy-air-of-a-landlocked-place poems, battle-fatigued-post-riot love poems, and a lot more... but my favorite was "That White Rush," here is a part:
(Fortune's song)
Of course you will see again my sparrows.
You will grow a thousand guileless corneas
On your fingertips. Even in the monster's
Beak or under the brute roofs of marriage,
Even in all jittering and aloneness and also
In your too muchness you will never fall again.
I will always be on of the marvels of your ocean.
I will always clutch at this dogwood limb
You lopped for me. And when the bleeding
Grows bored you will be master of your blood:
Like, can you believe that? And most of the poems in here are lighter than that, that is just a poem within a poem. I guess I found a lot of common ground in the subject matter of this book, being a woman who has too muchness and dwelling in the South. But I'm going to repeat CAConrad's review, and say that this is a book of poetry for everyone.
I loved this. Eerie-farm poems, heavy-air-of-a-landlocked-place poems, battle-fatigued-post-riot love poems, and a lot more... but my favorite was "That White Rush," here is a part:
(Fortune's song)
Of course you will see again my sparrows.
You will grow a thousand guileless corneas
On your fingertips. Even in the monster's
Beak or under the brute roofs of marriage,
Even in all jittering and aloneness and also
In your too muchness you will never fall again.
I will always be on of the marvels of your ocean.
I will always clutch at this dogwood limb
You lopped for me. And when the bleeding
Grows bored you will be master of your blood:
Like, can you believe that? And most of the poems in here are lighter than that, that is just a poem within a poem. I guess I found a lot of common ground in the subject matter of this book, being a woman who has too muchness and dwelling in the South. But I'm going to repeat CAConrad's review, and say that this is a book of poetry for everyone.
June 21, 2008
Surrealistic rural apocalypses?
June 1, 2024
reading Anne Boyer's early work always feels like a funambulist's act. i adore this little volume of incredibly radical and funny and politically incisive poems. i cannot imagine a better way to pose questions than this.
December 23, 2009
We laughed. They had to be kidding, but this was liberation--
we were breathing, ah down a neck, o in an eyelid, uh on a belly.
Her playfulness and the concreteness of her words in some of her more structured poems remind me a little of late Lisa Jarnot. But most of her poems are looser, and she also reminds me a little of Noelle Kocot, though she doesn't follow the endless folds of metaphor into oblivion the way Kocot does.
Or maybe she's just herself. Very strange but fun poems. Somehow I can get behind this kind of nonsense, whereas most poems in this vein I usually hate. She's loose but she's tight where she needs to be tight, and then she let's it all hang out. Her poems are very evocative of place and setting and narrative, though the narrative is then subtracted, and nothing is stated explicitly, and the most important words are substituted with something akin.
These days Woody propagandas me under the sheets:
We are never better than the Workers!
There are no Workers left, I'd answer,
but his sickle is hard against my knee.
What are these poems? They are hip and fast but not in an annoying way, not like some I've read. They are actually not as hip and fast as they first appear. Something about them is a slow personal vocabulary of superstitions obsessions thoughtfulness and intimate meanings. There's almost always something I see in these poems beyond 'cool words' or 'nice sounds'. There's a lot going on in here, past the surface.
At the same time, these poems are about nothing as well.
Though "Nothing, too, is a subject".
You stand for NOTHING but melody. And above metal melody, you have built a bank melody, and by that you WILL NOT be lyres.
Check out her website and her blog and book reviews.
Also, read this essay she wrote on feminism and other political subjects, which pretty much sums up why she's so awesome. "I want an avant-garde of light forearm touching." Exactly.
we were breathing, ah down a neck, o in an eyelid, uh on a belly.
Her playfulness and the concreteness of her words in some of her more structured poems remind me a little of late Lisa Jarnot. But most of her poems are looser, and she also reminds me a little of Noelle Kocot, though she doesn't follow the endless folds of metaphor into oblivion the way Kocot does.
Or maybe she's just herself. Very strange but fun poems. Somehow I can get behind this kind of nonsense, whereas most poems in this vein I usually hate. She's loose but she's tight where she needs to be tight, and then she let's it all hang out. Her poems are very evocative of place and setting and narrative, though the narrative is then subtracted, and nothing is stated explicitly, and the most important words are substituted with something akin.
These days Woody propagandas me under the sheets:
We are never better than the Workers!
There are no Workers left, I'd answer,
but his sickle is hard against my knee.
What are these poems? They are hip and fast but not in an annoying way, not like some I've read. They are actually not as hip and fast as they first appear. Something about them is a slow personal vocabulary of superstitions obsessions thoughtfulness and intimate meanings. There's almost always something I see in these poems beyond 'cool words' or 'nice sounds'. There's a lot going on in here, past the surface.
At the same time, these poems are about nothing as well.
Though "Nothing, too, is a subject".
You stand for NOTHING but melody. And above metal melody, you have built a bank melody, and by that you WILL NOT be lyres.
Check out her website and her blog and book reviews.
Also, read this essay she wrote on feminism and other political subjects, which pretty much sums up why she's so awesome. "I want an avant-garde of light forearm touching." Exactly.
January 13, 2009
now reading again...this is an important and amazing new book for all but i do believe it also proves that even post-post poets can bring something entirely different and new to the field of poetics. Boyer's book is daring, sexy, snarkey, playful, fresh and will make you write!
January 3, 2010
Hell to the yes Anne Boyer for her smirky yawp at the piddly moon. Just when I started to worry about whether poetry's meta-isms are just masturbatory, it hit me: masturbating is great. Of course! We should all be rubbing them out with as much gusto as Boyer in this awesome book.
March 3, 2011
This book is great. The voice is lyrical, eclectic, and sincere, and I loved the confluence of subjects. Well-organized too--I thought the last section was the strongest of the book!
Anne Boyer
Anne Boyer
February 27, 2009
I'm too old-fashioned in my poetical taste to let Boyer stand out. Most of the time I just had no idea what she was trying to say.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews