By Antonia Cassetta.
The poetry anthology Class, edited and sent in to Other Terrain by the reputable Les Wicks, is an enlightening collection that highlights the systemic plights of contemporary society. It tackles neoliberal capitalism unflinchingly, in a way that is undeniably human, breaking down the borders we have built up and wrongly attributed to the isolated circumstances of individuals.
By cutting across language and shepherding a broad variety of peripherised experiences to a levelled foreground, this collection is uniting. This focus on humanity is actualised by bringing the biographies of each poet into the text, cementing each story by name and location. Not only are these a functional method of undoing the reader subconsciously assuming the subjects as the Western middle-class, but they plainly lay out our actual diverse reality.
This anthology is not an abstraction of varied, separate life experiences taped together in post. This anthology is not a didactic condemnation of the sins of all us individuals coerced into valuing capital above all else. What Class is, is a manifestation of our joint world, carved into forms that allow us to understand our shared struggle. We are encouraged to find faith in our fellow human, our fellow worker, our fellow reader.