Jim Daniels – författare

A collection by one of America’s foremost poets of city life and work, In Line for the Exterminator brings Jim Daniels back to his native Detroit.

In Line for the Exterminator is the final collection in Jim Daniels’s trilogy of books explaining the urban working-class landscape. Daniels, who grew up near the Eight Mile Road boundary between Detroit and suburban Warren, Michigan, walks the razor’s edge of the borderline in this collection, examining complex issues of race and class that are a part of daily life there.

The title poem, "In Line for the Exterminator," sets the ironic tone for this collection, examining a group of people waiting in line for a sinister-sounding amusement-park ride. Daniels presents blue-collar culture both in and out of the workplace, showing its profound influence on the lives of workers and their families. As in Places/Everyone and M-80, Daniels uses his character Digger to show the effects of work on outside life, following Digger into retirement from his factory job and into his struggle to find a new future. In addition, Daniels deals frankly with the specter of urban violence that haunts the community and threatens to tear it apart. Local heroes, from professional wrestler the Sheik to the contemporary rapper Eminem, also appear as touchstones for the community’s complex view of itself.

How do ordinary citizens sustain hope and dignity in the face of economic and societal upheaval? How do people avoid the mirages offered by drugs and alcohol, or the intoxication of guns and crime? In Line for the Exterminator offers no easy answers but presents searing portraits of individuals struggling with these questions and finding small victories and moments of consolation in their everyday lives. Those interested in poetry, depictions of working-class city life, and Detroit social history will enjoy this significant volume.

Charts the emotional, political, and economic landscapes of the working-class Metro Detroit community and its residents.

Rowing Inland, Jim Daniels''s fifteenth book of poetry is a time machine that takes the reader back to the Metro Detroit of his youth and then accelerates toward the future. With humor and empathy, the author looks at his own family''s challenges and those of the surrounding community where the legacy handed down from generation to generation is one of survival. The economic hits that this community has to endure create both an uncertainty about its future and a determined tenacity.

Divided into four sections, Rowing Inlandcalls out key moments from the author''s life. The events that inspire many of these poems took place a long time ago and often it has taken the poet his entire life to write about those experiences and write about them with the necessary emotional distance. For example, some of the poems in the section "Late Invocation for Magic" reference the first girl he ever kissed and her accidental death by fire. In the last section of the book, Daniels approaches the current political and social standings in Detroit with lines like, "The distance to Baghdad or Kandahar / is measured in rowboat coffins / while here in the fatty palm of The Mitten / minor skirmishes electrify tedium." Although it focuses on Detroit''s metropolitan area, the book can be considered a snapshot of working-class life anywhere across the country. Daniels casts his lens on a way of life that is often distorted or ignored by the powers that be. He zooms in on street level where all the houses may look alike but each holds its own secrets and dreams.

To paraphrase novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, Detroit is the "zip code for [Daniels''s] heart"—a place that his writing will always come back to. Readers of contemporary poetry with a regional persuasion will enjoy this collection.