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.

Praise for Lee Bains

“Work Lunch is not simply the best of what poetry can be; it is proof that blues, soul and some god somewhere are real. This is what writing, witnessing with your senses, and giving a fuck can do. Lee Bains is one of them ones, y'all.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division

“A gospel of the steam table, a homily on solidarity, fueled by cornbread and buttermilk, special dogs and egg foo young—the brilliant and generous poetry of Lee Bains confronts the undermined promises made to the souls among us who work the hardest for the least.” —John T. Edge, author of House of Smoke, host of TrueSouth

“Work Lunch makes clear that Bains’s words, which have often been jammed tight into punk rock’s pelting cadence, deserve space and grace.” —The Bitter Southerner

“Lee Bains is a true poet of the South. Split between the distinctive Southern cities of Atlanta, GA and Birmingham, AL, the poems in Work Lunch are a sensory delight—lush with the smells, sounds, sights, and textures of the diversity of cuisines and peoples the Deep South has to offer. But alongside a genuine and deeply-rooted love for the region is an unwillingness to look away from its complications. Bains calls it like he sees it, offering critiques of issues like capitalistic greed, worker exploitation, racism, sexism, and maybe most obviously, hunger, but he does so with the keen eye and linguistic musicality I love and have come to expect from his songwriting. Work Lunch is a stunning testament to something Southerners know well and practice often: food brings us together, builds community, carries memory. In these poems, Bains centers mealtimes as a ways to break down barriers between cultures, languages, and socioeconomic classes, proving again and again that the divisions between us are actually not so large. Bains makes me proud to be of Birmingham, of Alabama, of the complicated South. This is a striking and necessary debut.” —Raye Hendrix, author of What Good Is Heaven 

“‘What is America, / if not the workers of these lands, / tucked in the hated corners of this sprawling nation, / hidden from the teetering walls of dusty leather-bound law?’ This question feeds the core of Lee Bains’s Work Lunch. In this electric collection, Bains finds these hidden workers at the lunch table, and the poems here invite us to sit with these workers and learn their faces before their faces disappear into the dust and smoke of the next shift. Sometimes, the table is in the corner of a meat-and-three. Sometimes, the table is the dashboard of a car fighting the current of midday traffic. In Work Lunch, Bains has created an American labor odyssey that moves in the traditions of Whitman and Sandburg with a lyric voice that could only be borne out of this moment and could only belong to Bains.” —Jason McCall, author of Dear Hero