Sealey Challenge Day 15: Human Resources

Blood Money

Erin Murphy’s recent collection Human Resources explores the human costs of the labor industry and the casualties of capitalism. Through a variety of imaginative persona poems, erasure poems from HR manuals, and personal homages to the unnoticed laborers around us, she offers a compelling critique of our culture that worships money at the expense of our humanity.

The title implies this paradigm—people are considered as tools of the economy. So while we can be shocked when reading that GM took 10 years to recall one of their vehicles, only after there were victims—there’s also a sense of complacency. We know the system is like this. In her persona poem “Recall,” it’s a mother’s recollection of her son’s economic ambitions that ends the poem with a sense of irony:

He was learning to be a welder so he could
get a job that paid better. He liked welding.
It was all about putting things back together.

The critique of capitalism also condemns the patriarchal fuel for its machine. In “Ike Turner’s obituary,” Murphy cleverly blacks out every word except for Tina, repeated over and over, trying to revive her role and reflecting the abusive way he profited off her talent, just one example of the misogynistic history of the music industry. Or in “If You Are a Massage Therapist in a Seasonal Town,” she conveys the normalcy of harassment and the sense of hopelessness that accompanies low-wage work.

This collection reminds me of how much power there is in persona poems—one of my first loves. When I read the collection Vice by Ai years ago (my first time through grad school), I was blown away by the immediacy of her approach and the capacity it had to teach me about history. In the years since, I tried to find ways to work them into my teaching of undergraduates. Murphy’s collection is ideal for this potential because of her accessible style.

This last excerpt provides a good example of how she finds a great last line to sum up the human cost, the price that capitalism exacts on our bodies and souls:

If you don’t go at all, you earn a $1 gift card
per day. Gary suspects the young ones
with their steel bladders will rack up

the rewards. Most of the old guys don’t stand
a chance—they’ll piss their way to a pink slip
before the next payday. They’ll linger
in the parking lot taking the last drag

off a cigarette before peeling off for good.
But not Gary. No sir, not him. If there’s
one thing he’s learned after all these years,
it’s how to hold it in.