“In these poems, you will encounter wood planes, buckets, pickup beds, mattocks, picks, pneumatic drills and more. With one of the best ‘ears’ among contemporary poets, Chitwood, who has himself worked on construction crews, in a textile mill and for a highway department, celebrates here work and all its gritty grind and glory.” —Dannye Romine Powell, Charlotte Observer
“From domestic chores to blue-collar construction, Living Wages is concerned with the vocations—sometimes rough, sometimes sacred, always unglamorous and hidden—that keep whole ways of being alive. A construction worker curses at his ‘shovels, digging bar, mattock, pick.’ A crew attends to a train under the cover of night. Chitwood becomes fascinated by how things work, but his true subject is what the cover leaves out: the people who use the ingenious devices, and how the things they rearrange the world with secretly rearrange them.” —Brian Howe, Indy Week