UNION DOWN // E.R. CARLIN

E.R. Carlin’s Union Down was recently reviewed in the Working Class Studies Association’s Working Class Notes.

Book Description
Youngstown has the lowest median income of any midsize city in the nation, according to 2006 U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Best described as a site of contested space, the steel mills have long since slipped their collective skins and flown overseas, and work migrated to the suburbs to support the service industry. Union Down, which takes its title from the term that describes the American flag flown upside down (and meant here as a symbol of cultural distress), centers itself around the concentric circles of poverty, place, class, myth, and the identity of growing up halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. In E.R. Carlin’s first chapbook, we are introduced to a new voice with staying power, who viscerally animates both the loss of a city and a way of living that leaves us, as it does him, “crammed like a bookmark into an encyclopedia / of the real thing.”

About the Author
E.R. Carlin grew up in Youngstown, OH. He was educated at Youngstown State University and recently received his MFA from Pacific Lutheran University. Carlin has worked as a bus boy, dishwasher, back-up cook, waiter, construction worker, 3D hologram salesperson, peace activist, and malcontent adjunct. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Hunger, Minnesota Review, Rattle, and Wisconsin Review. Carlin recently placed second in New South’s poetry contest and third in Quarter After Eight’s 2008 short prose contest.

Praise for Union Down

“Union Down is a remarkably innovative work that acknowledges the ecstasies and pain of working class family life, especially as such living has been transformed by time and the vicissitudes of cultural politics in Youngstown, Ohio. These poems recognize the psychic and physical imprisonment of the urban Ohio environment of modern America. This chapbook rages against rather than mourns about the inequities of such a life, while amplifying its hard-won rewards rather than celebrating them in any sentimental sense. Like works by William Olsen, TR Hummer and Linda Hull, the book rides a kind of high-velocity emotion, and in doing so it resists both threnody and delight. Fatalistic and with no choice but to privilege the present moment, “Riposte,” the penultimate poem of this collection, ends on a kind of prayer: “…may you walk backwards into the present, / the bullets always behind you.” I find this kind of writing both accomplished and promising.”
         -Kevin Clark author of Self-Portrait with Expletives, In the Evening of No Warning, and The Mind’s Eye: A Guide to Writing Poetry. His website is http://www.kevinclarkpoet.com/

“The poems in Union Down explore intense involvements with people and have a wonderful handling of the metrics and contemporary images of the working world.”
         -Dick Allen, author of seven books of poetry, most recently Present Vanishing

“There is a lyrical wallop and power to these poems not at all far-fetched with relation to the great Kenneth Patchen— a name as redolent of importance for me as that of John Coltrane.”
         -Roger Taus, editor of Split Shift and author of Gasoline Djinny & Other Poems, If You Ask Me Where I've Been, Poems From the Combat Zone.