[09/07/26] Prahl, Christy: Catalog of Labors

Unsolicited Press, paperback

Publication Date: September 7, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

Our professions are often where we invest the greatest portion of our time, energy, and ambition, sometimes at the expense of other priorities. Poetry is not expected to live in offices, banks, or bakeries, yet these are precisely the terrains Catalog of Labors invites us to enter.

This economical and incisive collection by Christy Prahl seeks to establish a poetics of work grounded in attention rather than spectacle. Organized around concise titles such as “The Plumber,” “The Docent,” and “The Vacuum Cleaner Dealer,” the book unfolds as a gallery of portraits that unmask what is routinely suppressed in professional life: emotional disorder, private longing, quiet resistance, and moral fatigue.

Across these poems, work persists through grief, aging bodies, and diminishing purpose. Sometimes we are the laborers; sometimes we are the ones shaped, managed, or depleted by systems larger than ourselves. Within that exchange, Prahl locates moments of unexpected majesty, elevating routine tasks into acts of endurance and care.

Clocking in for these twenty poems offers a meaningful return. Readers are invited not only to observe but to collaborate, to recognize themselves, to be trusted with the keys, and to leave with language that honors the work they do and the lives they live beyond it.