Temporary Worker Rides a Subway

by Mark Wallace

"In Temporary Worker Rides a Subway, Mark Wallace presents two long poem sequences that explore and question contemporary language surrounding money and work. Using a widely varied set of poetic forms. Wallace creates a poetry of comic outrage to highlight the inconsistencies and absurdities in contemporary notions about the degree to which money and work provide reasonable measures of the value of people's lives." "The first sequence, "Boys At The Guns," uses a combination of determinant "chance" techniques and authorial intervention into those techniques to turn the language of high finance against itself and into poetry. "Boys" concerns the November 1998 leveraged buy-out (LBO) of the RJR Nabisco Corporation, at the time the largest LBO in history and perhaps the high point of the Wall Street and corporate environment of the 1980s, an environment that profoundly changed American culture. Filtering the language of business through an Edward Lear nonsense alphabet and other systematic