Songs of the Glue Machines
Lummox Press • Soft Cover • 978-1-929878-41-3
Release date: 2013
DESCRIPTION:
In this first poetry collection Nicholas Belardes details the working class within California’s San Joaquin Valley in the late Eighties and early Nineties. His raw lyricism offers a glimpse into the struggles of everyday blue-collar workers in a forgotten part of America.
PRAISE:
“Belardes channels Neruda, Levine, and even Kerouac, with images that crank, slide and pull the reader in. His genius is best when his poems pop off the page, when readers grind their teeth as metaphors rumbling like twin engines tearing into chests.” —Michael Medrano, author of Born in the Cavity of Sunsets
“Belardes captures the beauty in the mundane, the light in the dank darkness of that hard factory floor. His poetry sings of the industrial nightmare America tries so hard to ignore. But, it’s there, and we are reminded by the power of GLUE MACHINES. Read and see.” —Brenda Knight, author of Women of the Beat Generation
“A docu-poetry epic of the heartbreaking struggle of factory workers, to save their dignity and humanity from the grinding heel of Capitalism. Belardes takes his place alongside Latino Homers of social change as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Victor Hernandez Cruz and Luis Rodriguez. ” —Alan Kaufman, editor of The Outlaw Bible Of American Poetry
“Songs of the Glue Machines is part meditation, part lamentation, part gut-wrenching cry for a lost segment of humanity. Packing words drenched in sweat and blasted with furnace fury, Belardes’ poems transform once invisible lives into true blood & bone beauty. Hard-worn and hopeless factory workers are elevated to saintly status.” —Rich Ferguson, author of 8th & Agony
” . . . stories of those stuck behind factory walls who we often ignore or pretend not to see. They are songs sung by machines that breathe pink glue, reminding us we all bleed the same color blood, connected by roads paved by those with calloused hands seeking dreams and living nightmares. They are poems to be carried on our backs.”—Tammy Foster Brewer, author of No Glass Allowed
“As a former factory worker (descended from two generations of factory workers), Belardes’ collection brings back the things I often try to forget, whether it’s the battle of blue versus white collars, constant dangers and repetitions, or the interchangeable workers, waste in the name of efficiency, and twisted metal. The thing about factory work is that it’s not just a job; it’s an entire world, and Belardes has captured that world in Songs of the Glue Machines.” —Robert Lee Brewer, Writer’s Digest editor and author of Solving the World’s Problems
“The intoxicating Glue Machines pulls the reader into a storied landscape like no other, one both familiar in the American psyche and yet nearly forgotten in an outsourced 21st century expatriation of the American Dream. Evoking the muscled metaphorical muses of working class poetry collections like B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe and Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island, Belardes similary makes a spellbinding song out of the gritty everyday — and transforms the stories of the machine into voices of a necessary, and not yet forgotten, language common to us all: we, the people who have invented, transformed, and worked with the raw materials of our modest lives to make beauty out of the necessary things with our rough hands.” —Ruth Nolan, editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts
“Glue Machines rolls in tight succession, chanting, calling out the names, faces, and raw pulse of the humanity that so often goes obscured.” —Tim Z. Hernandez, author of Mañana Means Heaven, Natural Takeover of Small Things and Skin Tax
“Drives hard across a sometimes harsh, sometimes sublime landscape of memory. Belardes writes in a kind of willful lyricism, giving us poems that are achingly present, insistently melodic and fiercely observant. They won’t let you go.” —Julia Bloch, author of Letters to Kelly Clarkson: Poems