Some of the Times
Those who are familiar with Gina Myers's previous work will be pleased to see Some of the Times build from the same base of social consciousness while also pushing in new directions. Myers captures what it feels like to live in this era of late capitalism in a way that few other poets do. This is a book for those who suffer and endure and laugh about the suffering later.
Sales of Some of the Times support the Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project in Philadelphia and the First Ward Community Center’s LACER (Literacy Arts Cultural Enrichment Recreation) program in Saginaw, Michigan.
Published October 15, 2020
90 pages
By Gina Myers
PRAISE FOR SOME OF THE TIMES
Gina Myers is a deeply authentic poet who intimately captures her struggles with rent, debt, work, illness, politics, and violence in the capitalist ruins of America. Throughout, she bravely confronts some of the times that she almost died and lovingly holds onto some of the times that she fully felt joy. This book is necessary reading for our precarious times.
- Craig Santos Perez
In Gina Myers' Some of the Times, Myers addresses herself, her heart, the night, and her anti-capitalist comrades with a downbeat struggle, a night wakefulness tempered always by reality. Here, the city's sirens and burnt out ruins run the same temperature as an off-handed pass me the cigarettes. Their multiple modes--photojournalistic documentary about Saginaw, litany of brushes with death--all portray the decline of American life with profound melancholia always leaning towards the jocular. With echoes of Niedecker, Myles, and Schuyler, these poems lower your guard, then break your heart; You'll want to leave them where someone else can find them--a bench, or on a bus.
- Cynthia Arrieu-King
A daughter of deindustrialized Saginaw, Gina Myers is sensitively attuned to forms of capitalist ruin: the city long after the factory closes, the wage earner barely getting by in a shit job. Whether surveying the blight and arson of her hometown or settling into a gentrifying Philadelphia, Myers tallies the manifold promises capitalism offers and never keeps: “There is an anger I carry/inside that I will never/let go of. Something basic/to hold onto while everything/else disappears.” A daybook of alienated labor and catcalls, chronic illness and summer heat, bad Philly landlords and losing sports teams, Some of the Times is also a daybook of pleasures leveraged against exploitation and misogyny, songs a worker sings to survive her work, songs a lover sings to guard her heart.
- Brian Teare
ABOUT GINA MYERS
Some of the Times is the third book by Gina Myers. She is also the author of A Model Year (2009) and Hold It Down (2013), as well as several chapbooks (including Philadelphia through Barrelhouse). In addition to poetry, she has published numerous essays, reviews, and articles for a variety of publications, including Hyperallergic, Frontier Psychiatrist, Fanzine, The Rumpus, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. Originally from Saginaw, MI, she lives in Philadelphia, PA, where she coedits the tiny with Emma Brown Sanders and runs the Accidental Player reading series and small press.