For Work / For TV
For Work / For TV
Fee Griffin’s debut For Work / For TV is a cinematic and cheeky closeup of the life of an essential worker—or unskilled worker, depending on your bottom-line. Who we are in the eyes of late capitalism and neoliberal politics, how that defines us and excludes us. How that merges with how we are reflected in the television screen, disembodied from ourselves yet entirely embodied in our exhaustion.
This collection of poems is the crazy number of hours you work to pay the bills and that sliver of TV “me time” at the end of the day. It is stories of motherhood, economics, and labor, and the TV personas that have a duty to be as real to us as the ones around our dinner table every night.
Griffin has not only written a love letter to the kings and queens of factory canteens, workshops, and bus stops, but an urgent and necessary record of “reasonable response[s] to the question of being alive.”
—Daniele Pantano, author of ORAKL
Fee Griffin lives in England near the North Sea. She studied at Dartington College of Arts and later at the University of Lincoln, where she continues to serve as a senior poetry editor for The Lincoln Review. She has recent poetry and other writing published in journals such as Poetry London, Hotel, Streetcake, Channel, The Abandoned Playground, and in PORT. words from the edge of land, an anthology from Dunlin Press (2019). She now works part-time as an associate lecturer and part-time as a cleaner. For Work/For TV is her first book.
Here, we are reminded that community can also be atomizing. Encountering For Work / For TV will be a jolt of recognition.
—Jane Lewty, author of In One Form to Find Another
In this extraordinary debut collection, Griffin examines and explores everyday minutiae obscured by the glare of popular culture and the routines of working-class lives. With raw humor and devastating honesty, Griffin has not only written a love letter to the kings and queens of factory canteens, workshops, and bus stops, but an urgent and necessary record of “reasonable response[s] to the question of being alive.” For Work / For TV dazzles with its formal agility, tonal virtuosity, and imagistic subtlety, and lines such as “One day she went to the garden centre, bought a bird bath & placed it / sixty miles from her back door because that is how to be happy” bear witness to Griffin’s remarkable linguistic and imaginative powers. Here is a brilliant and utterly unique new voice in contemporary poetry, so read these poems not for work or entertainment—but for the life you might rediscover. I, for one, cannot and will not stop reading this book.
—Daniele Pantano, author of ORAKL
Dexterous and shrewd, generous and playful, Fee Griffin’s debut collection scans its eye-gaze across domestic settings and sites of labor; a blend of different constrictions and liberations. We may recognize the textured landscape[s] here: the media that hums to our exhaustive days; the streets that unfurl through our own individual and collective memories; the oblique yet gnawing question of how to make a life productive—its value, losses and gains. These formally inventive poems reverberate impressively; they are replete with echoic humor and occasionally linger in quiet devastation. Here, we are reminded that community can also be atomizing, and that servitude and its routines affect us in many layered ways. Encountering For Work / For TV will be a jolt of recognition; it urges us to see that we simultaneously switch on to/settle into our lives, and somehow—in that conflicted process—coherence is often found. In solidarity, Griffin’s adroit, impassioned poetry is necessary and needed.
—Jane Lewty, author of In One Form to Find Another
