Yeoman’s Work: Poems (2020) is available from Bottom Dog Press as part of their Working Lives Series. You can purchase copies via the publisher, Bookshop.org, or Amazon.
Praise for Yeoman’s Work
In Yeoman’s Work, Stack writes with a regional precision so pronounced, so of the marrow of the Midwest, I wonder if someone not from the region would miss just how nuanced it really is. Coupled with that regionalism is a narrative of love nurtured by a sensitivity that knows true cruelty, hardship, and loss. Though this is Stack’s first, the breadth and depth of the collection, as well as the talent of the poet behind its production, couldn’t be clearer or more promising.
-Mitch James in a review for the Cleveland Review of Books
Singer John Prine would have loved these poems. He’d have taken them on the road, wished he’d written them. Garrett Stack makes it look so easy: nothing fancy, and nothing should be. It won’t take long to recognize what he has accomplished is anything but easy. Because of Stack’s mastery of line, tone, movement, sound, timing, and voice, you’ll quickly realize that you’re not reading–you’re listening, listening to distinct and captivating voices rich with surprise and because each enters an environment within the world of work that is unexpected. This gang is worthy of your empathy. And as Prine sang, I bet you’ll say, “Hello in there.”
-Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron
Garrett Stack’s Yeoman’s Work mines the richness of life’s pitstops–weddings, funerals, trips to the Quik-Fil and Supercuts–and illuminates how closely personal narrative is tethered to place. From cowboys making coffee to doers and dreamers and taxidermists, Stack’s work is a vital cultivation of individuality and an homage to the complexity of domesticity. “A place doesn’t exist/ until there’s a story/ spinning around it,” he writes. How lucky we are to hear those stories.
-Lauren Shapiro, author of Arena
The women and men in these poems–dirt under their nails, rust flaking off their hearts–are so fully realized they might as well be sitting next to you at the diner when you read them. Through generous empathy and a keen eye, Garret Stack reveals the cooling embers in strangers’ souls before kindling them, so that they might once again faintly glow. The poems build to powerful resonant images and gut-punch final lines. Yeoman’s Work is a hell of a debut.
-Adam Schuitema, author of The Things We Do that Make Sense