God of the Kitchen

In his stunning third collection, God of the Kitchen, poet Jon Tribble creates an unflinching account of his first job — and an unsettling portrait of an Americana that exists under the ever-watchful eye of Colonel Sanders. These insistent, unsentimental poems grunt and heave with the bone-deep exhaustion of real work, detailing the perils of an adolescence performed in a uniform of grease and flour and sweat. At once elegy and critique, interrogation and ode, this book is dense, dazzling, and utterly necessary, revealing again and again what it means to be a body expendable, a cog in the larger machine that is Corporate America, and how the scars from such an experience linger long after the final paycheck is spent.

—Stacey Lynn Brown, author of Cradlesong