Contents
Preface
Xu Bing’s Flying Phoenixes
I. Workers and Miracles
John Henry Sleeping in High Grass
Where the Steel of Ploughs
Preachers
Houses of Ice, 1969
The Lay of Paradise, 1970
A Baby in the Crash of ’29
Mass Production
II. The Wheel
Spirit Boxing
Morning Shift
The Good Traveler
The Bluesman Speaks on Original Man
Ivory Soap, a Whiteness
The Worker We Named Freight Train & His Revelation of Ezekiel’s Vision
When They Fired Our Magician
Knowledge of Silk
Beatitudes, the Merciful
Handling the Heaviness
How to Use a Buck Knife
Beatitudes, the Peacemakers
When Hard Men Love Each Other
Freight Train Returns from the Hospital
Black Scab
A Truck Driver from West Virginia
The Good Job
The Winepress
Freight Train Watches Me Do My Taiji
In Mencken’s Neighborhood
III. Wheels Inside Wheels
When the Farms Give Out
Walk On, Walk Away
A Postscript to Giant
Interiors, a Miner’s Home
Grabbing Lunch in the Morgue
A Nation of Hands
Ode to the Wheelchair
Get on Up, Now
Whole Cloth
A Legacy, Southern Kin
The Gray Mare
Blood of a Union of States
Mr. Fugg’s Hardware Store
Making Soldiers
Ode to the Hard Men
The Hipness of Hips
IV. Coda
Repack Room
Where No Good Can Live
The Architecture of Factories, 1985
Ode to the Righteous Union
Dear Mystical Reader
Notes
Acknowledgments