Someday There Will be Machine Shops Full of Roses

In 1973 Fred Voss abandoned a PhD in English literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, and went to work as a machinist in a steel-mill. Someday There Will be Machine Shops Full of Roses looks back on fifty years of working on machine-shop floors up and down the West Coast – the noise and the silence, long shifts and short tempers, old-timers and pushy young machinists, profits in the boardrooms and wage-cuts on the cold shop-floor, the bravado, the boredom and the comradeship. These new poems confirm Voss as the heir to Charles Bukowski, Philip Levine and Robert Tressell, beautiful hymns of praise to skilled workers everywhere who handle the dangerous Promethean gift of fire: