The Work is Done when we are Dead by Jade Wallace (Guernica Editions 2026)

Work poems. They still seem (or seem more) like a niche concern in the world of Canadian poetry, despite the efforts in British Columbia at least of Tom Wayman who, according to BC Bookworld: "...became a co-founder and prominent member of the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union (1979-1993), a group that staged many readings throughout the 1980s at La Quena Coffee House...in East Vancouver. [Wayman] was variously employed at journalism, construction and demolition, while also being a high school marker, a factory assemblyman and a college teacher. (Other members of VIWU included Kate Braid, David Conn, Glen Downie, Kirsten Emmott, Al Grierson, Phil Hall, Zoe Landale, Erin Moure, Sandy Shreve, Pam Tranfield, M.C. Warrior, and Calvin Wharton)."

The only other poet I can currently think of whose poetry has engaged with the working world is Edmontonian Alice Major with her mythified The Office Tower Tales from 2008 in which readers meet, "receptionist Aphrodite, Sheherazad in PR, and Pandora, expectant grandmother from accounting, who gather to share tales during coffee breaks from their male-dominated engineering firm." There are others, I'm sure, but with the shift to unstable university employment for the majority of poets, the art of the blue collar world has become invisibilized or even erased as a viable subject. 

Jade Wallace's second collection in four parts, The Work is Done when We are Dead, isn't just about work in terms of jobs of course, but about the deeper concept of conditioning, how we are all inflected by what work we "must" accomplish and how this moulding slips us inside the capitalist maw from the get-go, as we sign "all contracts..."with/the wet of our bodies,/ with blood or sweat or come" (Union). 

A reader's eyes and ears can never grow bored of Wallace's book because every page shifts, as if each showing a new machine of language and form that one can inhabit and query. There is lineation and stanzaic labour; there is the sweat of a sestina and the slog of an unravelling villanelle; there's machinations of numerals and charts, of propositions and syllogisms. Most of these work brilliantly, willing to take the essential risks of craft and language. Wallace mucks with the Biblical Job, twisting him into a "Job" that "can be difficult...can be demanding" then becomes a baker obsessed with the "amandine" and the "croquembouche" and shortly after turns into a "cabbie" who is also a "paramedic...gondolier...undertaker." 

Slithering through the overt work pieces are poems that address gender such as the superbly sonorous "The Changing of the Masks" that begins alliteratively: "She has been called an emasculator,/a castrator, a maker of contralto choirs,/a cutter of organs," insomnia (Sleep Twitch) and mysticisms of love that in a poem like "Grip" unfolds into the exquisite ending of "We'll sew/pillows with the tamarind and jasmine that/arrive, tacit and silken, between snowfalls." Wallace tosses out words like "hierath" "tasseomancer" and "mortichnia," like unexpected raises amid the workaday world of common words. Only occasionally does Wallace's tautness slide into the automatism of banal lines like "let me fall asleep to/the possibilities of you" (Grip) or "you will be the one who/sticks around for the mess" (There is Dirt in Every Eye) or becomes pedantically abstract as with "I thought of great spirits wanting endless/attention and my resentment turned amyctic" (Acariasis). 

One of the most important poems in relation to work is the piece in segments called, "How can a Boss be Good?" that addresses the problematics of hierarchy and its namings as with the chef boss whom the speaker must lexically navigate around, admitting, "I won't say/ he was good, but I will say he was a lamb,/ or a plum."  And the most gorgeous poem, "Watermeadow" recounts, in couplets, the now obsolete work of the "waterman" who did "the slow tasks:/banking the panes, raising the sluice" and now sees the marsh returning, "the crack willows thriving,/ breaking their backs against the snow." 

The Work is Done when We are Dead holds echoes of Elizabeth Bishop, Nyla Matuk, Phyllis Webb within it and is wholly its own fluctuating, articulate, experimental self. And, amid the human employments, Wallace's poem, "Eight Resurrections of a Domestic Cat" movingly presents a treatise on the work of grief too where the mind labours to produce alternatives to death, then ends hopefully with the "dream of a tenth life."