BOOK CORNER March Book of the Month
Trembling in the Bones by Eleanor Swanson
Ghost Road Press: Denver, Co
At first, flipping through the pages of Eleanor Swanson’s Trembling in the Bones is like flipping through a labor history book. Breaker boys drink coffee, work grueling hours, and spit like grown men. Husbands disappear into the dark seams of earth. Women scrub coal dust from men’s clothing on washboards. Even the infamous Mother Jones makes an appearance.
But Swanson’s book is not a history text book; her work is a collection of poetry capturing the stark, harsh and even violent world of the Colorado Coal Mines in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
From the start of the book, Swanson describes the landscape of this world. In her opening poem, Allotment she writes “Everywhere its seams wind deep/honeycombs of rich, dark coal/wealth without end” (15). But whose wealth? The answer to that question is what this collection explores. From this first poem, the tension is apparent, and in this tension, we see the faces of those we may know and hear familiar voices --including observations from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mother Jones and General William Jackson Palmer.
However, the vast majority of the book is devoted to those who have been nameless in history. In Explosion: Garfield County Colorado, 1903, housewife Olive Lawson recounts her experience as a survivor of a mine explosion: “I thought I was already dead, but I picked up/the baby, wrapped my shawl around her/and ran for the door, my mouth gulping air/my throat raw, windows shattering…” In another poem titled simply, Robert Martinez, the narrator speaks from the grave, telling about his young experience in the mines: “Each day I smelled the bitter-dry/air for gas and coal dust/and swore my own sons/ would never work/in the mines.” And then there’s the young man in Breaker Boy who “makes a game of being/quick with his fingers” – the same fingers his mother tends “with stinging iodine.” His one wish? He will be going deeper into the mines to be a “door boy” where he will “whittle/wood dolls for my sister/with troll faces and long/sharp teeth…” These narrative poems makes the reader feel the prick of sharp earth or gasp for air as if breathing thick coal dust.
For those who may be afraid of poetry, there is nothing to fear here, except perhaps the stark, serious images of labor history: each poem reads like a story, an individual testimony of a life we may not know, but should. For those who don’t know much about this period of labor history (and are perhaps afraid to admit this fact to themselves), Swanson includes a historical note outlining the tragic events of this time period.
Swanson’s book belongs in every library – whether it is a public library, or the personal library of a labor historian, a poet, or a reader simply interested in the human experience of injustice.
View previous Class Action Book of the Month selections...
March Book of the Month:The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality
February Book of the Month: Class and Parenting
January Movie of the Month: The Story of Stuff
December Book of the Month: Graceful Simplicity: Towards a Philosophy & Politics of Simple Living
November Book of the Month: All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life
October Movie of the Month:The Milagro Beanfield War
September Book of the Month: Tearing Down the Gates
August Book of The Month: Staff Picks
July Book of the Month: Theory of the Leisure Class
June Book of the Month: Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons
May Book of the Month: Death in the Haymarket
April Book of the Month: Food Politics
March Book of the Month: Psychology and Economic Injustice
February Book of the Month : What's My Name, Fool?
December Book of the Month:
Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming
November Book of the Month: Awol
October Book of the Month: Class Passing
September Book and Video of the Month: Beyond Silenced Voices and Declining By Degrees
August Books of the Month: Human Cargo and Gathering the Sun
July Book of the Month: The Overworked American by Juliet Schor
June Book of the Month: More Money Than God by Steven R. Leder
May Book of the Month: Global Class by Jeff Faux
April Books of the Month: Classified and Strapped
March Book of the Month: Welfare Brat, A Memoir by Mary Childers
February Book of the Month: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
January Book of the Month: Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender by Paula Rothenberg
View last year's Book of the Month selections...
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