Scraping Away

In this debut, full-length poetry collection, Fred Shaw offers a deep dive into the cost of service work. Scraping Away is a collection of narrative, sometimes elegiac poems that express the point of view of restaurant workers. Shaw considers the cost, not just in dollars, of feeding a starving public that often finds those in the service industry to be faceless and replaceable. The poems here hope to celebrate and humanize those 102.6 million workers. Exploring issues of class and labor, profit, loss, and privilege, Scraping Away reminds us that a person is more than just their job.

The speaker in these poems also explores complicated family relationships and the angst of his blue-collar, Rust-Belt adolescence. Poems delve into the speaker’s relationship with his parents, often using music and the world of things as a trigger to reflect and express memory. Scraping Away leans on clear language and an imagistic sensibility to bring readers into the community of restaurant workers and their inner lives. Reminiscent of Studs Terkel’s classic, Working, Shaw’s collection passes the issues of the working class into the realm of poetry.