Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time

Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back explores the question of how to live in a natural landscape that offers beauty while being consumed by industry, and in an economy that offers material benefits while denying dignity, meaning and a voice to many in order to satisfy the outsized appetites of the few.

A cri de coeur from a poet who has long celebrated the voices of working people, the collection also grapples with why “anyone, in this era so profoundly lacking in grace, might want to make poems—or any kind of art.” But the keen sense of justice that drives the collection is tempered by the poet’s reluctance to take himself too seriously: “Centuries without the benefit / of my presence / have to be made up for / by my words.”

The poet brings the perspective of age to our current troubled existence, with the reminder that as a society and as individuals we’ve faced perilous times before, and that our shared mortality links us more than circumstances and politics divide us.

“Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back is what poetry should be in a tumultuous era; something readers of any educational background can easily understand and relate to immediately, while still leaving plenty of room for nuance.”

“While Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back is rooted in lineages of both work literature and nature writing, it is also an unflinching snapshot of our own times: their divisive politics, their accelerating corporate and industrial violence against poor and marginalized peoples, and against the biosphere. Here are angry rants, wistful meditations, and difficult questions. ‘Amid so many words,’ Wayman asks, ‘where in a spectrum of needs, desires, hopes do we locate the authentically human?’”

“Wayman is still at work creating poems that are as astringent and individual as human pain, and as universal as our highest hopes for a beloved community. Readers will be grateful for this record of his latest labours.”