A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last 50 years in light of the massive changes in people's working lives.

Jasper Bernes is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University and the author of We Are Nothing and So Can You (2015).

"Developments in poetry and art, Bernes argues, also feed reciprocally into...transformations in the workplace, as 'aspects of the artistic critique, such as the critique of work from the standpoint of participation, became essential parts of the restructuring undertaken by capitalists to improve profitability'....[With] acute sensitivity to poetic form and [a] profound grasp of historical capitalism as filtered through their chosen sites of the gendered body and the workplace...Bernes [avoids] reductively optimistic or pessimistic claims about either poetry's total immunity or its total complicity."