Night Shift at the Utopian Turtletop Factory - Paperback

by Kirby Olson (Author)

The book takes its title from Marianne Moore's famously rejected suggestion for the Edsel-"Utopian Turtletop," a moment when high modernist language briefly brushed American industry and was politely set aside. Night Shift at the Utopian Turtletop Factory imagines that phrase surviving after hours, carried into the night shift where work, prayer, and speech blur: poems shaped over years of pruning and return, attentive to the ricochet between working-class religion and the long afterlife of modernism, with older roots reaching back toward early patristic voices. Rather than argue positions, the book listens for pressure-how belief, labor, and inherited forms strike one another and leave a residue in the line - so that what began as fragments and refusals gradually coheres into a single, nocturnal field of attention.