Stacy Szymaszek, author of Famous Hermits and The Pasolini Book writes:
“I love poems that impart how poets get by, meaning, what we do for a living. I also love poems that take risks that can only come from lived experiences of risk. In I Was Working, Ariel Yelen lays bare the sly vagaries of late capitalism (would you rather be ‘love-low’ or ‘money-low’?) and offers a way to reinvent our relationships outside the logic of exploitation through authentically living with others. Yelen uses the tension of writing poetry when she has no time to write to create some of the most beautiful ‘work poems’ I have ever read. Her book is no small miracle—it’s so good.”
Cathy Park Hong, author of Engine Empire and Minor Feelings, writes:
“Ariel Yelen’s poetry is exquisitely witty and charming. These poems are intimate etchings of a poet’s daily life under late capitalism. Astutely observed, pleasurable to read, and heartbreakingly relatable, I Was Working is a collection you’ll read and reread."
Selected by New York Public Library Staff & Librarians as Top 10 Best Books of 2024
NYPL
Interview w/Leah Dworkin
BOMB Magazine online (2024) "These poems ask the question, what does it mean to live a life that exists in an establishment outside yourself?
What is time when it’s not ours? What is the job of the poet?"
Review of I Was Working
Rain Taxi Review (2024) "In her debut poetry collection, I Was Working, Ariel Yelen composes with the strangled chords of the contemporary workplace a fresh kind of music. . . .
Yelen’s poems convincingly render the drone, distraction, and seething frustration of that chthonic bargain the modern creative has to make: holding a day job."