Spirit Boxing

Description

In Spirit Boxing, Weaver revisits his working class core. The veteran of fifteen years as a factory worker in his native Baltimore, he mines his own experience to build a wellspring of craft in poems that extend from his life to the lives that inhabit the whole landscape of the American working class. He writes with an intimacy that is unique in American poetry, and echoes previous comparisons of his oeuvre to that of Walt Whitman. The singularity of his voice resonates here through the prism of his realization of self through a lifelong project of the integration of American and Chinese culture. The work is Daoist in influence and structure as it echoes both a harmonic realization of context and the intuitive and transcendent dance of body, mind, and spirit. Contents Preface Xu Bing’s Flying Phoenixes I. Workers and Miracles John Henry Sleeping in High Grass Where the Steel of Ploughs Preachers Houses of Ice, 1969 The Lay of Paradise, 1970 A Baby in the Crash of ’29 Mass Production II. The Wheel Spirit Boxing Morning Shift The Good Traveler The Bluesman Speaks on Original Man Ivory Soap, a Whiteness The Worker We Named Freight Train & His Revelation of Ezekiel’s Vision When They Fired Our Magician Knowledge of Silk Beatitudes, the Merciful Handling the Heaviness How to Use a Buck Knife Beatitudes, the Peacemakers When Hard Men Love Each Other Freight Train Returns from the Hospital Black Scab A Truck Driver from West Virginia The Good Job The Winepress Freight Train Watches Me Do My Taiji In Mencken’s Neighborhood III. Wheels Inside Wheels When the Farms Give Out Walk On, Walk Away A Postscript to Giant Interiors, a Miner’s Home Grabbing Lunch in the Morgue A Nation of Hands Ode to the Wheelchair Get on Up, Now Whole Cloth A Legacy, Southern Kin The Gray Mare Blood of a Union of States Mr. Fugg’s Hardware Store Making Soldiers Ode to the Hard Men The Hipness of Hips IV. Coda Repack Room Where No Good Can Live The Architecture of Factories, 1985 Ode to the Righteous Union Dear Mystical Reader Notes Acknowledgments