CHRISTY PRAHL CLOCKS IN WITH CATALOG OF LABORS, A POETRY COLLECTION ABOUT THE WORK THAT MAKES AND UNMAKES US

Most of us will spend an astonishing amount of our lives working. We will serve coffee, answer phones, clean houses, teach classes, fix pipes, drive strangers across town, sell things, make things, carry things, explain things. Then we will go home carrying pieces of the job with us. In Catalog of Labors, poet Christy Prahl looks directly at that exchange.

Published September 7, 2026, by Unsolicited Press, Prahl's 54-page poetry collection presents twenty portraits of workers, moving from the massage therapist and bank teller to the sanitation worker, baker, professor, engineer, housekeeper, window washer, driver, and plumber. The titles are simple. What happens underneath them isn't.

Prahl is interested in the part of work that never makes it onto the job description: grief carried into the shift, resentment swallowed for a customer, bodies aging under repetition, boredom, dignity, class, care, pride, private fantasy, and the strange ways a profession can become tangled with identity.

A vacuum cleaner dealer watches internet shopping eat away at his business while remaining stubbornly devoted to repair. A window washer hangs twenty-six stories above an office tower, watching the people behind the glass. A housekeeper realizes that something she once loved has become labor. A plumber puts on one of seven gray shirts every morning and heads to his appointments with the certainty: “This is who I am. / This is my name.”

The result is neither a sentimental tribute to the American worker nor a eulogy for work itself. Prahl lets the contradictions stay put. Jobs can feed families and consume them. Labor can provide purpose and grind it out of us. People can hate the thing they do and still take enormous pride in doing it well.

That tension has roots in Prahl's own family. In the acknowledgments, she writes about a grandfather who spent decades as a tool-and-die maker and put four children through college, a grandmother who organized food-service workers and confronted a school board over respect and fair treatment, a mother whose university career ended after she was downsized and who later found meaning in sales, and a father who abandoned his original dream of teaching for the security of an insurance career.

Those histories run beneath Catalog of Labors. This is poetry from the break room, the kitchen, the train, the shop floor, the cubicle, the driver's seat, and the scaffold outside the office window. It is poetry about what we make for a living, and what making a living makes of us.

Christy Prahl is an Illinois Arts Council grant recipient and the author of We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023), With Her Hair on Fire (Roadside Press, 2025), and Catalog of Labors (Unsolicited Press, 2026). A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in Poetry Daily, CALYX, Sugar House Review, Salt Hill Journal, and other publications.

Catalog of Labors is available now from Unsolicited Press. The paperback retails for $18.95. ISBN: 978-1-969421-02-0. Unsolicited Press titles are distributed to the trade by Asterism Books.

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