The Poem Factory

THE POEM FACTORY is where you end up when the world no longer wants you. These are poems set in the corners of America seldom mentioned in poetry. Waitresses and strippers, truck drivers and store managers, outsider poets and welders fill the pages with their lyrical insights, their midnight desires, their miseries and their hope. Here are the good times against the bad times. In The Poem Factory, Frank O’Hara is the world’s laziest mover and Walt Whitman is a guiding light. Wal-Mart looms and the student loan people want their money back. Temp work is a career choice. Getting your teeth cleaned is a luxury. Written in the spirit of world poets like Nicanor Parra and Nazim Hikmet, coupled with pure American Grit, Newman’s poems start where most poems stop. He tells truths we’re all embarrassed to know. “Dave Newman is an immense talent!” —Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff “Dave Newman is the truth about America. He is lyrical and outrageous and tells the saddest stories I know. In The Poem Factory, he shows our great decline and how we don’t know how to fall. This is a beautiful, powerful book.”—Mohammed Pouchek