RaveJewish Currents...[a] compelling exploration of radical working-class poetry ... Even at their most complexly modernist—often collaging from multiple texts, including workers’ first-person accounts and news reports—Nowak’s poems have always centered the voices of workers, struggling for dignity amid economic exploitation ... As a poet and tenured professor, I felt a mix of awe and regret reading Social Poetics, thinking back to the years that I could have better leveraged my position of privilege on behalf of those who have been denied platforms and power. While Nowak’s work implicates those of us who replicate the very conditions we should want to reform or even overthrow, it also invites us down a path where solidarity through poetic community can lead to radical social transformation ... Imagine: what if the writing workshop were widely understood as a site not of taste-making or star cultivation, but of freedom?
