Resumé

Mayapple Press, 2014

The epigraph for Chris Green’s Résumé is taken from Brodsky’s employment trial in the Soviet Union: “I changed jobs because I wanted to learn more about life, about people." These clear-eyed yet inventive poems about work offer a hard-won wisdom that lifts us above suffering to understanding. Green’s is a marvelously spare and colloquial voice with the kind of detail that cherishes and transforms our lives, that compels us with the authority of experience. His material is his own and others brutal and toxic jobs, which in the hands of such a skillful poet, provide a vision that reaches beyond the subject to his spare but complex epiphanies:  “. . . everything in the end/is suffering, even love.” Nothing is exaggerated—like Green’s style—just precise and credible realizations that resonate and illuminate—grit, humor, vision—everything necessary.

—Christopher Buckley