Paperwork: An Anthology

Paperwork, a provocative sampling of the best new work writing in North America, breaks this taboo. These poems are written by people who build houses and machines, catch fish, take care of children, manage companies, work hard at looking for work, and much more. The writing is funny and tough and sad and angry, and the poems come from insiders - men and women who work for a living.

Praise for Going for Coffee, Tom Wayman’s first anthology of work poetry (1981):

Going for Coffee has a freshness that kept me going through it … The poems are funny, or horrifying, or just as truthful in some unsuspected way.
-Robert Fulford, Toronto Star

For me, the work writing fills a large gap in literacy education … it provides the richness of the human experience in the language of working people, and does so in a rich array of voices - exultant, sorrowful, angry, wry.
-Stephanie Smith, former director, Reading for Life Adult Literacy Program, Watsonville, California