The Art of Bagging

Most of the poems in The Art of Bagging were written while Joshua Gottlieb-Miller worked in a grocery store, often in fragments on the folded-up piece of paper he kept tucked in his pocket. Gottlieb-Miller worked at Trader Joe's after getting his undergrad degree, left the store to pursue an MFA, and then returned after completing his advanced degree. Feeling stuck, watching time tick away stocking shelves, Gottlieb-Miller found himself dreading the store but writing more and more. This is a hybrid book. Because so many of his co-workers said or did things that inspired poems, Gottlieb-Miller knew he wanted to interview as many as he could. Many of these poems of retail labor are informed by meditations on visibility or invisibility, the accessibility of the setting and that frustration giving way to lyrical and meditative flights. The book's arc traces the speaker's recognition of these workers' shared positions--thoughtful individuals enmeshed in a singular, larger system--within an economic and, by the end of the book, metaphysical space.