Work Lunch

In his debut poetry collection, Alabama poet and musician Lee Bains draws on his own experience at the intersection of work and food—the daily ritual of a workday lunch.

Lee Bains’s four albums center what Rolling Stone once called “Southern gospel punk.” In Work Lunch, his poems explore the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of Southern culture and values through the lens of food, whether at a meat-and-three or a taquería. In sprawling, long-form poems, Bains mines subjects of family, the often invisible work of service, and the horrors and comforts of fast food chains.

A take-out gyro prompts a reflection on religious-nationalist violence, a Cuban sandwich spurs consideration of U.S. imperialism, a hamburger channels into a cry of solidarity with organized labor, and a salad elicits an epic rumination on lineage, class, race, gender, memory, and faith. These poems glimpse sandwiches under shade trees, tables full of boisterous coworkers discussing barbecue, and reflective moments at those dwindling local spots, all fertile ground for investigating Bains’s home places of Birmingham, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia, the systems of power that shape life there, and the ways in which ordinary people survive, connect and fight back.