Crowley’s debut book of poetry is a heartfelt, timely celebration of essential workers.
If there’s a hero in this new collection, it may well be Rob, the main figure in “Papa Gino’s at closing.” Rob is a “graying, middle-aged male” who toils away at a pizza franchise. Late one night, a teenage girl comes in and asks, “ ‘Rob, could you bring the pizzas out / to my car? It’s soooo hot after it comes out of the oven.’ Silently, / Rob obliges.” It’s a moment so fleeting you’d miss it if you weren’t looking carefully, but fortunately for all of us, Crowley is. It’s also what short story master Raymond Carver once called “a small, good thing”—a little moment of human kindness that is so perfectly representative of decency that we’re tempted to think that our humanity is built on it. Not for nothing, Rob is also one of those titular people who “hold up the earth.” Crowley says in his introduction that he dedicates his poetry to those people who are “forgotten and taken for granted.” He elaborates on this in the first poem: “Are they rickshaw puller / or did they pave the road he rides upon? / Are they dishwasher, with the stink of / sodden food permeating wrinkled hands?” The Covid-19 pandemic has given us a new name for some similarly unacknowledged heroes: essential workers. As such, Crowley’s celebration couldn’t come at a better time, and his poetry is, among many other things, a request that society should better acknowledge those who do such difficult jobs. He yearns for a world different from our own, in which “one or two may be chosen / to ascend from the paycheck-to-paycheck / world to a place where one can / buy a newer car, which doesn’t shake.”
An earthy, invigorating read.