Announcing Judith Hall's new book Prospects (New from LSU Press), which includes this poem:
Natural / Work Hard / Ability
Done in stain-obscuring dark pants pulled on for work
Tossing out the one last second-hand self-help book
Help yourself to hard work is not the half of it
Work hard will never be distinctly natural
Natural is not a camouflage of hard work
Not the plucked waxed dyed in private lines learned
Sensible shoes will open doors the boring doors
Check out the body language of competitors
Jokes at you at your expense required about now
The one about your ow designer shoes ow ow
Supposed to blend in a joke right without the laugh
Resentment is supposed to harden you in life
When laughing at yourself is not a living wage
You can live on for long without a brain-dead brain
Judith Hall is the author of four earlier poetry collections and a collaboration with David Lehman, which she also illustrated. She has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She taught for many years at the California Institute of Technology, and, after moving to New York, she taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts. She is poetry editor of Antioch Review.
"Few poets have written so incisively of worldly ambition; few have viewed power dynamics with such whiplash intelligence. The pursuit of happiness, the tragedy of war, the exploited environment are central to this book that considers survival in all its guises. Judith Hall's unsparing poems fracture lyric desire into edgier components—including money, what it takes to earn it, the "zany can-do grovel" of job seekers. Prospects is one of the richest, smartest books I've read by anybody—I think ever. One close reading wasn't enough, and as I reread, the poems continued to open up. This infinite reach is for me one of the prime joys of poetry."
— Alice Fulton