American Bones

[ABSTRACT ONLY; NO FULL TEXT] In my project, "American Bones," I use poetry as a documentary form of social engagement. Some poems examine how poverty is perceived and lived-in in contemporary America while others investigate a range of familiar objects, ideas, and places that makeup the bones of "Americana" as I see it. That is to say factories, farms, families, places and persons who might otherwise remain unseen. I am deeply emotionally indebted to the working class, the get-up-everyday- and-grind-backbone of this country. I seek to open up the caverns of their sometimes invisibility, frequent anonymity, and the weight of their gravitational pull. I have aimed to highlight anonymous places, faces, jobs, deaths, and stories and for these poems to breathe as they breathe, not to judge, evaluate, romanticize, or glorify, although some pieces are critical of a system which condemns so many to destitution. In some instances, the poems in this collection are based on my own personal experiences as a person from a working class family that often struggled, as many families do, with hunger and provision of necessities of daily life. The goal of both the personal narratives and the documentary poems is to claim what I see as a universal survival instinct in people struggling with poverty or other forms of marginalization. That drive, to me, is a pulse that chimes on with relentless fervor like an American assembly line. That drive is what makes American Bones.