Love & Solidarity by Brendan Joyce
full length book of poetry — 6 x 9
release date: 9. 3. 20
cover: Matt Mitchell
digital version here
Joyce's debut full length develops a poetics to examine the contradictions the working class faces, the role of the restaurant industry in gentrification and the many available strategies to liquidate the ruling class. A poem in three acts; Love & Solidarity splits the world into before, during and after the pandemic to mirror before, during and after class consciousness.
"Working-class poetry is precisely what Brendan Joyce writes, from his workplace to mine—and if that makes him an outlier in today’s literary world, it’s also part of what makes him so damn good." -Alex Skopic, Cleveland Review of Books
"Joyce is attentive to (and often savagely funny about) the collision of the intimate and the structurally violent." - Nell Whitaker, Spam Zine
Brendan Joyce is the author of three collections of poetry; Character Limit (2019), Love & Solidarity (2020) and coming later this year, Personal Problem (2023). Along with Kevin Latimer, he is the co-organizer of Grieveland, a poetry press for displaced workers in Cleveland, Ohio. His poems have appeared in Protean Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, waxnine, The Reservoir and Prolit.