LABOR

Jill Magi’s new book—comprised of fiction, poetry, and archival research—LABOR explores relations between workplace and workers, race-class-gender, the institution and the body, the “personal” budget and the economy, the archive and undisciplined paper trails. An “employee handbook” sequence runs throughout the text, providing a set of directions for ritual practices toward individual agency and workplace/worker transformation. But unlike the archived ideologies and hopes of traditional labor history that LABOR’s characters eventually abandon or never fully embraced, the transformation does not look like traditional progress or reform.