Blurbs from book from two fine poets:
A collection 5 years in the making, A Living is not a Life: A Working Title, recalls the poet’s first and second hand experiences of work. The back cover is graced with two wonderful blurbs which might give you a better sense of the book’s contents.
Alan Berecka’s collection of “work” poetry moves toward an ethical, even existential conclusion– honest but not brow-beating or self-righteousness. The poems unmask the false values of our work-world. Berecka’s voice is not that of a lazy, jerk-off kid, but a man, now in his sixties, who has played the game with ironic, rebellious effort, in the spirit of Camus’ rebel hero, perhaps even approaching the societal-resistance of Melville’s Bartleby. But Berecka writes with damn-fine humor, and his work is always graced with his self-effacing style and redeemed by his soul-affirming humanity.
– Ken Hada, author of Contour Feathers
“You know what work is—if you’re / old enough to read this you know what / work is, although you may not do it.” These lines from Philip Levine’s great “What Work Is” kept echoing in my mind as I read Alan Berecka’s hard-earned, heartbreaking, bitterly funny meditations on that most fundamental of all human undertakings: work. The son of a welder (“My father welded—a masked alien / master of fire, heat and light, violator / of cold elements…”), Berecka has worked at baling hay, he’s been a garbage man, a sewer cleaner (“professional turd herder”). Phone operator. Teacher. Librarian. Somewhere along the way he became a poet, who has alchemized all his labors into something beautiful. This is the story of work. The story of a life. I love this book.
George Bilgere
A Review of a Living is not a Life: A Working Title from Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry 2023.
