CATALOG OF LABORS

Praise for CATALOG OF LABORS

It seems a rare person who, like “The Professor” in Catalog of Labors, has found “the thing he chooses to do / and will choose to do” even as “he knows he is dying,” yet this collection is filled with those who find pride and meaning in their work. In this tender and attentive accounting of the people who pick up the trash, make our coffee, and deliver the newspaper, Christy Prahl opens a window into the worlds of unseen workers and their invisible labor. The poems she crafts about these anonymous unnamed laborers are precise and unsentimental—the immigrant farmer whose land becomes an extended lifeboat for his family; the meteorologist who “remind[s] people / that I’m not the storm itself” and wipes his face clean of the makeup he wears on set; the vacuum cleaner dealer who put his children through college on sales and repairs but now can barely make rent. As Prahl honors American workers, she asks us to consider who—and what—is left behind in a world where technology is changing the nature of livelihood and heightening the disparities between those who serve and those who consume.

Ann E. Wallace, author of Keeping Room

Christy Prahl’s Catalog of Labors will change the way you think about the question, “What do you do?” These poems look beyond the surface descriptions of the jobs we perform, exploring how we think about ourselves and each other as we do them. They share a clear vision of how work’s meaning is inherently tied to relationship: a vacuum cleaner dealer devoted to repair, a customer service representative’s patient voice reaching a lonely, desperate woman. Through Prahl’s nuanced, compassionate view, these seemingly commercial exchanges turn into moments of intimacy and care. In a time of pervasive dehumanization, I'm buoyed by these sometimes humorous, often tender portraits that treat each subject—from banker to massage therapist to trash collector—with dignity and generosity. I love this little book. It is (unlike so much of the work we do) pleasurable and profound.

Onna Solomon, author of Disorder 

One moment you are vexed with the challenge of embalming a body, next you are a bitter barista spitting in a customer’s coffee or a paperboy on the cusp of adulthood and a changing world. With each entry in Catalog of Labors, Christy Prahl entrusts us with the stories of the humans we depend upon every day. With her deft and gentle words, her poems ask us to consider them with curiosity, humanity and the utmost tenderness. 

Emily Kerlin, author of The Sword Swallowers and Twenty-One Farewells

These are poems about people in our daily lives, who labor and provide a service and are often taken for granted. Thankfully, when a thoughtful and empathetic poet like Christy Prahl pays attention, they are impossible to ignore.  In Prahl’s poems, honoring people like you and me becomes a thoughtful and tender mission that reminds us that work is hard and redemptive.  You might say —I certainly do— that Catalog of Labors is a taxonomy of deserved dignities, unsentimental observation as a form of profound respect.  As she says, in the voice of the makeup artist at the funeral home, “work is an atonement for vanity, / and a tallying.”

Juan Pablo Mobili, Poet Laureate of Rockland County, New York; author of Contraband

Playlist for CATALOG OF LABORS

About CHRISTY PRAHL

Christy Prahl is an Illinois Arts Council grant recipient and the author of the poetry collections We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023), With Her Hair on Fire (Roadside Press, 2025), and Catalog of Labors (Unsolicited Press, fall 2026). A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work has been featured in Poetry Daily as well as many national and international journals, including the Asheville Poetry Review, CALYX, Rattle, Louisville Review, Penn Review, Sugar House Review, Salt Hill Journal, and others. She was a featured poet on the Hive Poetry Collective podcast, and two of her poems have been set to music by post-punk musicians. She splits her time between a small workers’ cottage in Chicago and refurbished Quonset hut in southwest Michigan.