With clear passion for his topic, Mark Nowak takes poetic muscle and sets out to illuminate the human cost incurred with industrial globalization and a culture that has chosen to forget that it ever knew a working class.

Shut Up/Shut Down, a collection of seven long narrative poems, is highly stylized and as complex as the issues addressed. The poet mixes voices in this collection like a jazz musician on a soundboard. We hear a running narrative from those who lived by doing work that is no longer deemed cost effective.

“You’re fifty-three and they don’t want you anymore
On his jacket is an ‘iron-master’ emblem, which u.s. Steel awarded to the workers
 at Duquesne for the mills high productivity in 1841, the year the plant closed down.”

This chorus of voices chimes throughout and is interspersed with epigrammatic asides:

“America
[history’s
        signs]              :      “No

Parking
       Anytime””

The poet carries the reader through the nearly lost cities of the once dominant steel industry with a rap music rhythm.

They were tired of never getting promoted, and they were tired of being treated
	Like dogs
		By…White…
                                           foremen….. 

Get work.  Get (worked) over.  Get up, get worked up, get working
(together) again.

Could there be less likely topics for poetry than Ronald Reagan, McCarthy anti communists and Red Baiting? Mr. Nowak sought the poetry in these and carries them to the reader.

The immediate impact of the denouement 
Of the controllers’ strike has been
To enhance Mr. Reagan’s prestige:
Shooting down a union
And two Libyan jets
Has worked wonders for a president
Who was already riding high in public esteem.

Nothing in this poetic narrative is straightforward. Every section has two or three distinctly different approaches woven into a collage. Were it presented on a stage it could be sung by a choir in parts. It creates a sense of chaos and confusion appropriate to the ideas expressed inside and outside the lines on the page.

For readers who seek order, one could read one voice, one device, one report at a time instead of wading through the cacophony. One could sort it out, shake loose the tangled edges, then wind it back around itself after a closer examination. The art would still be there upon the second visit.

There are photo images offered in the second half—a powerful and effective enhancement to the overall work. If the words ever fail to illustrate the struggles that are honored here, the photos move the reader to see grief and loss in broken glass, boarded buildings, chained entry gates and empty roads.

The last section looks to the Iron Range in northern MN and leaves the world of abstraction to list exact numbers of jobs lost in each of those towns. These sad cafe, bar and store front photos tell us plenty and again the poet speaks in three tongues. There are the earthy remarks by the marginalized workers, the newsprint view and then the rhythmic poets response:

Paid bills paid dues shut stopped unpaid.  Like storefronts the bus passed on 
my way to the unemployment office.  Shut[down] trust, “in God we “rust”, 
tell me who the fuck are “u.s.”

And just before we leave the collection, a Wal-Mart ad and all it implies. So, the dark situation is sung in some mix of rap and ballad. As poetry can do, at its most courageous, it asks questions of the reader. Is the working class a piece of American history and myth? Are jobs that cost workers life and limb to be replaced by jobs that corral men and women into cubes in cleaner clothes and better light but lower wages and fewer benefits? If enough family members work enough hours at Wal-Mart can they thrive and dream of educating their children? Mark Nowak doesn’t pretend to know the answer to these either, but one cannot help hear a door closing on a certain economic era when reading this artful collage. The workers that are mourned and celebrated here would not likely be the intended audience; it feels a bit more an academic rebellion than a picket line chant. Brought to life on a stage, though, photos in the back and the mad and confused chorus of voices singing these words, would move any person to realize that most of us, in any line of work, are only a paycheck or two from perfect understanding of Mark Nowak’s words.

“Working class kids writing their names on a wall that is bound to erase them”

- Beadrin (Pixie) Youngdahl