Seeking to find a song of the self that can survive or even thrive amid the mundane routines of work, Ariel Yelen鈥檚 lyrics include wry reflections on the absurdities and abjection of being a poet who is also an office worker and commuter in New York. In the poems鈥� dialogues between labor and autonomy, the beeping of a microwave in the staff lounge becomes an opportunity for song, the poet writes from a cubicle as it is being sawed in half, and the speaker of the title poem decides 鈥渢o quit everything except work,鈥� sacrificing her life and loved ones to bury herself in her four jobs, striving at any cost to find relief from the attempt to both have a life and be a good worker鈥斺�淣o one was happy to see me, and so / at last I could work. No one said it鈥檚 okay. It wasn鈥檛 / okay, thus my work flourished.鈥� Despite such discontents, I Was Working finds humor, play, and even joy in its original and compelling search for the possibility of self-liberation.
Awards and Recognition
- A New York Public Library Top Ten Books of the Year for Adults
- NYPL Best Book of the Year
Ariel Yelen is a poet whose work has been published in Poetry, BOMB, the American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, and other magazines.
"In her debut poetry collection, I Was Working, Ariel Yelen composes with the strangled chords of the contemporary workplace a fresh kind of music. . . . Yelen’s poems convincingly render the drone, distraction, and seething frustration of that chthonic bargain the modern creative has to make: holding a day job."鈥擜ustin Adams, Rain Taxi Review of Books
“Ariel Yelen’s poetry is exquisitely witty and charming. These poems are intimate etchings of a poet’s daily life under late capitalism. Astutely observed, pleasurable to read, and heartbreakingly relatable, I Was Working is a collection you’ll read and reread.”—Cathy Park Hong, author of Engine Empire and Minor Feelings
“I love poems that impart how poets get by, meaning, what we do for a living. I also love poems that take risks that can only come from lived experiences of risk. In I Was Working, Ariel Yelen lays bare the sly vagaries of late capitalism (would you rather be ‘love-low’ or ‘money-low’?) and offers a way to reinvent our relationships outside the logic of exploitation through authentically living with others. Yelen uses the tension of writing poetry when she has no time to write to create some of the most beautiful ‘work poems’ I have ever read. Her book is no small miracle—it’s so good.”—Stacy Szymaszek, author of Famous Hermits and The Pasolini Book
