Super Worth It • Print Only

Summary

With “light blues, dog energy,” Super Worth It embodies the conflicts of the self in late capitalism. Steeped in Anthony Warnke’s working-class upbringing and bourgeois consciousness, these linguistically iridescent poems skip between nursing homes, spin classes, sports bars, and break rooms. In scenes fraught with everyday life, he negotiates achievement, masculinity, consumerism, and family bonds. These poems say funny and occasionally biting things out loud, with tenderness and grief under their breath.

Details

• Selected for the 2021 Emerging Poets Chapbook Series
• Saddle-stitched, risograph cover, 48 pages, 5″ x 7.25″, FSC-certified paper
• Order print + e-book
• Order e-book only

Praise

“These poems are about class without preaching or easy answers, about capitalism as it feels on the ground and in the gut. The collection begs the question of what the world is actually worth. Warnke gives us vividly concrete and metaphorical tools to answer—all that and more. In a bluntly colloquial voice, deftly phrased and smoothly turning, the poems in this splendid debut unobtrusively sing.”
        —Deborah Woodard, author of Borrowed Tales

“Warnke skewers the insipid palliations of American consumer culture in this funny, surreal, and gleefully cynical collection. He writes of the absurdities of the banal with a vicious wit and timing of a stand-up comic. Super Worth It asks what is finally ‘worth it,’ exposing a commodified culture where the only thing ‘redeemed’ might be an online gift card, and where he assures us ‘everything will be okay / if we expand our definition / of everything and okay.’”
        —Bruce Beasley

Author

Anthony Warnke’s poetry has appeared in Cimarron Review, North American Review, Salt Hill, Sentence, Sixth Finch, and Sugar House Review, among other journals. He also publishes scholarly work promoting access and equity at two-year colleges. He earned his Master’s degree in English from Western Washington University and is currently enrolled in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Washington, Seattle. He teaches writing at Green River College and lives with his spouse in Seattle, where he co-facilitates the Columbia City Writing Circle.

Artwork

Cover by LK James.