Overview

In Bartending for a Stamp with My Face on It, Kate Garcia writes poems of wanting and loneliness, poems that attempt to negotiate power with men and trust in one's own body and desires. These poems follow a woman in her 20s thinking deeply about growing up and growing old, learning how to care for herself and, of course, her dog. As much an ode to as a criticism of the service industry, this collection speaks to the ways in which we find beauty in ugliness, meaning in magpies and lime wedges.

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9781965158197

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Reviews

Bartending for a Stamp with My Face on It, Kate Garcia's compelling chapbook of poems driven by attentiveness to the world offers astute observations and meditations on the human condition. These poems plumb the speaker's desires as well as those of figures like ""Buzz"" and ""Dog"" and ""mom"" and ""dad"" by exploring the work of living. I'm drawn in by the speaker's care for herself and the world around her as she finds her way in these poems. In ""Bartending as Meditation"" we hear ""life takes a long time,"" and throughout this series we find the seeking and speaking of the motivations that drive how we attend to our lives in the meantime and, ultimately, how we are seen. I'm grateful for this collection and look forward to the necessary work of this emerging voice. --Sean Hill, author of The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures In the great tradition of poets of labor like Philip Levine and Dorianne Laux, this suite of poems by Kate Garcia delivers on the complicated dynamics of a body within an economy, and all of the sweaty and delicate identity-shifting that our lives as workers entail. As Garcia writes, ""I take the job to / turn myself inside out."" But Bartending for a Stamp with My Face on It is not only a portrait of America at its most essential-prone to violence, pockmarked with gas stations and motels, full of dangers wrapped in shiny packaging-it is a feminist portrait, too, where the poems reveal the fundamental dynamics of gender, power, and a working girl who's working it. Think Dolly Parton when you read the words ""There is beauty / ...in our problems becoming / the same problems."" And there is beauty in these poems, too: wild, hungry, searching beauty that's impossible to turn away from. -Keetje Kuipers, author of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

Author Information

Kate Garcia is a poet from the Inland Empire of Southern California and a graduate of University of Montana's MFA program. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast Journal, Florida Review, Fugue and elsewhere.

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