Travelers Aid Society

the long version

"Jeff Sirkin's Travelers Aid Society charts a wayward swerve off the grid of received United States history lessons, a wanderer defying artificial borders. Whether Cincinnati, Buffalo, or Ciudad Juárez, Sirkin turns a city's artifice aside and confronts its infrastructure instead: machines and the people whose labor operates them. A plumber repairing a drain. A bartender serving last call. These tender-hard (think Gen X punk) poems also document the speaker's own consumer culture, his service economy. Thrilled to travel (post) cities with this keen-eyed poet"--Carmen Giménez Smith, quoted from publisher's website.