Gold Country
Autor Vanesha Pravinen Limba Engleză Paperback – 2 noi 2026
Vignettes of working-class life create a panoramic portrait of the emotional wages of surviving in America
In Gold Country, Vanesha Pravin crafts indelible vignettes of labor, race, and contemporary existence that together offer a panoramic view of today’s United States. Through each life that she conveys line by startling line, she traces the disparity between aspiration and reality when it comes to the American dream: an undocumented worker waits on a celebrity, a government contractor compromises his integrity to secure the future of his children, a career waiter is haunted by the contrast between his inner life and reality, and an orderly steals credit cards for a fix. Wistful and weary, her protagonists wrestle with thwarted dreams and personal shame, but in stitching together a patchwork from their lives, Pravin asks us all to confront the wider realities of deprivation, greed, and their insidious influence on how we function as a society. Gold Country offers a gorgeously nuanced portrait of working life in a supposedly democratic country, airing hard truths about labor, complicity, and the rifts between us.
In Gold Country, Vanesha Pravin crafts indelible vignettes of labor, race, and contemporary existence that together offer a panoramic view of today’s United States. Through each life that she conveys line by startling line, she traces the disparity between aspiration and reality when it comes to the American dream: an undocumented worker waits on a celebrity, a government contractor compromises his integrity to secure the future of his children, a career waiter is haunted by the contrast between his inner life and reality, and an orderly steals credit cards for a fix. Wistful and weary, her protagonists wrestle with thwarted dreams and personal shame, but in stitching together a patchwork from their lives, Pravin asks us all to confront the wider realities of deprivation, greed, and their insidious influence on how we function as a society. Gold Country offers a gorgeously nuanced portrait of working life in a supposedly democratic country, airing hard truths about labor, complicity, and the rifts between us.
Preț: 154.08 lei
Precomandă
Puncte Express: 231
Carte nepublicată încă
Livrare prin curier în România Precomanda se expediază când titlul devine disponibil.
Transport gratuit de la 400.00 lei Plată online sau ramburs, în funcție de opțiunile comenzii.
Retur gratuit în 14 zile Comandă securizată și suport în română.
Doresc să fiu notificat când acest titlu va fi disponibil:
Se trimite...
Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259979
ISBN-10: 0814259979
Pagini: 104
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814259979
Pagini: 104
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Gold Country is a fearless, thrilling book. I admire the social detail and awareness, the unsentimental sympathy with people who work for a living, the quality of including and getting beyond political territory. Pravin has enlarged her first book’s masterful verbal music to include a tremendous sweep of subject matter and tone.” —Robert Pinsky, former United States Poet Laureate
“Few contemporary poets possess Vanesha Pravin’s tremendous range of voice and imagination. Global economics and household chores, irony and openness, narrative sweep and lyric compression: The poems in Gold Country offer infinity in the palm of your hand, eternity in an hour, and do so with canniness, compassion, and fabulous tonal color. Poems such as ‘Red,’ ‘In Real Time,’ ‘Industry,’ and ‘How to Live in This World’ will be with us for a long time.” —Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls
“Gold Country is a cry against complacency, a portrait of economic injustice and the broad swathe of American citizenry who’ve become inured to it. In the poems’ gorgeous intricacy of sound, their lyric precision, there is urgency and clarity of conviction. I admire the unbent spirit of these poems and the poet, who is determined to give a damn, to be ‘ruthless about care,’ who has ‘no use for closure’ and looks clear-eyed into the red, white, and blue of America’s open wounds.” —Maggie Dietz, author of That Kind of Happy
“These vital poems of suppressed rage precisely observe and lament the textures of life and language in our commodified American commons: the names of the artifacts of our overconsumption, the soul-numbing corporate speak of the office, the dignities and indignities of service work in our time, the violence of our unfolding political reality, and each reported injustice. Pravin urgently evokes, in a way I have not seen elsewhere, a mind struggling to bear witness to and reckon with an unavoidable entanglement with extractive capitalism and an endless news stream while investigating what remains—in ‘gold country’—of our inner lives.” —Heather Green, author of No Other Rome
Notă biografică
Vanesha Pravin is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ May Sarton Prize for Poetry and the Golden Poppy Book Award. She is the author of Disorder (University of Chicago Press). She teaches at the University of California, Merced.
Extras
Dishwasher
The morning began with images of decapitations and anxiety about
Foreign policy debacles. But then the dishwasher needed to be loaded.
You had to get through The Forks, then came The Plates, then the
Labored application of utility theory to All That Was Strangely Shaped like
The Splatter Screen, ultimately shoved against The Kitchen Shears,
Leading into The Displacement of Gadgets trotted out for
Special occasion, such as The Tomato Corer, the newly ordered
Thyme Stripper from the Sky Mall catalogue. Day and night:
Loading and unloading the dishwasher again and again
Against the heat of radicalization happening right here with
Loved ones surfing the web day and night, slowly spiraling towards
Conspiracy theories: connecting the dots with online rumors and casting
Politicians as pedophiles, scientists as opportunists, doctors as fascists.
And still you have to cook for them, you have to wash their dishes.
In time, the Spray Arms will tire and the odor will be stronger than
White vinegar. Every tool will go out, only to go right back in.
Day and night: The dishwasher will run with a brittle gasket and one
Rusted prong. One wrought iron fence post, with a severed head.
The morning began with images of decapitations and anxiety about
Foreign policy debacles. But then the dishwasher needed to be loaded.
You had to get through The Forks, then came The Plates, then the
Labored application of utility theory to All That Was Strangely Shaped like
The Splatter Screen, ultimately shoved against The Kitchen Shears,
Leading into The Displacement of Gadgets trotted out for
Special occasion, such as The Tomato Corer, the newly ordered
Thyme Stripper from the Sky Mall catalogue. Day and night:
Loading and unloading the dishwasher again and again
Against the heat of radicalization happening right here with
Loved ones surfing the web day and night, slowly spiraling towards
Conspiracy theories: connecting the dots with online rumors and casting
Politicians as pedophiles, scientists as opportunists, doctors as fascists.
And still you have to cook for them, you have to wash their dishes.
In time, the Spray Arms will tire and the odor will be stronger than
White vinegar. Every tool will go out, only to go right back in.
Day and night: The dishwasher will run with a brittle gasket and one
Rusted prong. One wrought iron fence post, with a severed head.
Cuprins
I. Red
Civilian
Red
After AIG’s Bailout Money Was Used to Pay Out Bonuses of $165 Million
Nap-of-the-earth Flight
Dishwasher
The Government Contractor
Latex
Café in a Strip Mall, Christmas Before the 2017 Inauguration
II. Gold
Vegas: The Cocktail Server
Bear Market
Career Waiter
In Real Time
VIP
Apology
Soccer
Nondisclosure Agreement
The Waiters
White Papers
US Military Budget For Fiscal Year 2019 Reaches Over $700 Billion
There is my rent, there is my pension
A Disc Ruptures
Industry
Fault
The Market Fluctuates
After Calculated Risk
Green Almond
After Loss
Rush
Another Attempt
The Question of Luck
III. White
Of the Developer’s Pitch
Dialectic Through a Stained Glass Window
Orchard for Sale
Subdivision, America, Early Twenty-First Century
The Meadows
Central Valley, California, 2010
The Botanist’s Eye
The Flying J Truck Stop
White
The Providers
IV. Blue
Blue
How to Read the News
The School at the Aquarium
The Fish Spin Like Go-Go Dancers
Workaholic
RSVP
Between Boss #1 and Boss #2
We Are Now at Our Cruising Altitude of 36,000 Feet
Afterlife
Business
How to Live in This World
Gold Country
Civilian
Red
After AIG’s Bailout Money Was Used to Pay Out Bonuses of $165 Million
Nap-of-the-earth Flight
Dishwasher
The Government Contractor
Latex
Café in a Strip Mall, Christmas Before the 2017 Inauguration
II. Gold
Vegas: The Cocktail Server
Bear Market
Career Waiter
In Real Time
VIP
Apology
Soccer
Nondisclosure Agreement
The Waiters
White Papers
US Military Budget For Fiscal Year 2019 Reaches Over $700 Billion
There is my rent, there is my pension
A Disc Ruptures
Industry
Fault
The Market Fluctuates
After Calculated Risk
Green Almond
After Loss
Rush
Another Attempt
The Question of Luck
III. White
Of the Developer’s Pitch
Dialectic Through a Stained Glass Window
Orchard for Sale
Subdivision, America, Early Twenty-First Century
The Meadows
Central Valley, California, 2010
The Botanist’s Eye
The Flying J Truck Stop
White
The Providers
IV. Blue
Blue
How to Read the News
The School at the Aquarium
The Fish Spin Like Go-Go Dancers
Workaholic
RSVP
Between Boss #1 and Boss #2
We Are Now at Our Cruising Altitude of 36,000 Feet
Afterlife
Business
How to Live in This World
Gold Country
Descriere
An urgent and indelible panorama-in-poetry about working-class experience in contemporary America.