From the cannery rows of California to the sweatshops of New York, this
        anthology of poems captures the drama of work and working-class life in
        industrial America. It speaks of rolling mills, mine shafts, and foundries,
        and of a people who dig coal, tap blast furnaces, sew shirts, clean fish,
        and assemble cars. These subjects, though largely absent from literary
        anthologies and textbooks, are increasingly evident in the work of contemporary
        poets. Working Classics gathers the best and most representative
        of these poems, American and Canadian, from 1945 to the present.
      Included are poems by Antler, Robert Bly, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jim Daniels,
        Patricia Dobler, Stephen Dunn, Tess Gallagher, Edward Hirsch, David Ignatow,
        June Jordan, Lawrence Joseph, Philip Levine, Chris Llewellyn, Joyce Carol
        Oates, Anthony Petrosky, Michael Ryan, Gary Soto, Tom Wayman, James Wright,
        and many others. The result is a diverse and evocative collection of 169
        poems by 74 poets, nearly a third of them women.