Lit: My Time: The Lunch Break Book

MY TIME: THE LUNCH BREAK BOOK
Compiled by Chris Bodor
Poet Plant Press 2007

By Shannon McAleenan

The poems featured in the Chris Bodor-edited compilation “My Time: The Lunch Break Book” range from terse to flowing, but they all have one thing in common: they are written with the lunch break in mind. Whether that represents a reprieve from the factory, a fleeting peace amid school’s chaos, or a few minutes away from household duties, the poets in “My Time” were all inspired by that 30- to 60-minute break so many of us take for granted. And Chris Bodor, who printed the collection himself under the guise of St. Augustine’s Poet Plant Press, ties it all together in the dedication, stating that “lunch breaks and poetry are both about nourishment: how healthy we become when we fill our bodies and minds…”

Arranged into three sections, “My Time” includes single poems in the Short Lunch section, six poems by Wayne Mason in the Featured Poet section, and three to four poems by nine different poets in the Long Lunch section. This variety keeps things fresh, especially for a booklet dedicated to a single subject. Short Lunch standouts include Linda Kay’s informal “g,” Raindog’s ode to lunchtime beer, called “The Transition,” and the hospital-influenced “Palms” by Aleathia Drehmer. Miles J. Bell’s “The Great Roaring Avalanche Is Right outside the Window” also provides an effectively brief look at the simplicity of life, but the true power of the collection comes in the more extensive looks at poets like Wayne Mason, t. kilgore splake, and J.D. Nelson.

The poets featured in Long Lunch perform a variety of jobs, from factory worker to teacher, fast food server to mental health counselor, and stay-at-home mom to “rugged individualist/freak/weirdo.” Mason provides a fascinating look at the soul of factory life in the alliterative “After Lunch” and the dense “Factory Walls,” while splake’s Beat-inspired minimalism simultaneously awes and terrifies in “time passing” and “winter morning alone.” History and laundry become intertwined in Helen R. Peterson’s “Laundry Day,” and the aforementioned “weirdo” Misti Rainwater-Lites gets seductive and scintillating in “Hot Box Lunch.” Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal compares un-air-conditioned cubicles to the underworld in “Hell,” and J.D. Nelson worries that “you know something’s wrong/when a fly chooses your shoe/over a pile of shit” in “Fast-Food Watercolor.” The final poem, by Mathias Nelson, brings the weight of the collection directly to the gut: his description of preparing elderly nursing home patients for lunch is at once disgusting, sobering and horrifying.

Equal parts uplifting and scary, the book wrestles with the meaning of pursuing a writer’s craft while also providing for life’s basic necessities. We all can’t be starving artists with hours to kill scribbling in notebooks, and “The Lunch Break Book” provides an enlightening look at the sacrifices necessary to balance work and art.