Book cover for Works & Days by Gina Myers

Works & Days is coming soon from Radiatior Press!

“Gina Myers’ Works & Days registers all the hours we’ve lost to working; it also registers the continuous urge to want more from life than just sustaining oneself with a paycheck. Myers guides us through a number of ekphrastic reference points, including episodes of The Twilight Zone, Marx’s work, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and the films Alien and Aliens, allowing us to see that at least we’re part of a trajectory. Works & Days desires something else, and it buoys us as we all try to find our collective footing amidst our exhaustion and our hope. I love this book.” —Marie Buck

“‘What is it that keeps you alive’ asks the final line of Gina Myers’ Works & Days. From TED Talks on gratitude and ‘Motivational Monday’ emails from her boss to punk and country classics seemingly spinning endlessly on a jukebox in a working-class neighborhood bar, Myers has created nothing short of a poetic catalog of gig economy work. These sharp and sentient poems detail and celebrate the daily anti-celebrations of our wasted working lives.” —Mark Nowak

“Gina Myers’ Works & Days is a serial poem of rare and startling lucidity, its clarity of thought an antidote to shit capitalist conditions that keep people sick and dying. Myers invokes a chorus of decades of music, TV, and movies made from a place of refusal. Sounding throughout are the punk, grunge, and new wave strains of The Jam, Dead Kennedys, Neil Young, Loverboy, Johnny Paycheck, and the Ramones. Myers juxtaposes employer propaganda with reality: workers are told to be grateful but haven’t gotten a raise in years. AI will ‘save’ the environment after it’s destroyed it. Works & Days’ antidote is two-parted. The first is to name the poison. The second is to imagine a life spent living, to desire more and state that desire plainly and bravely. What heart this takes. ‘I like to know the real work of living / The things you do not for a paycheck / What is it that keeps you alive.’” —Ebs Sanders