The Custodian

Illustrations by Miki Lowe

Edward Hirsch didn’t always write poetry for a living. He’s been a busboy, a railroad brakeman, a garbage man; he’s worked in a chemical plant and in a box factory. “You never forget,” he once told an interviewer, “what it means can structure one’s days—one’s life. Work is strangely absent from much of contemporary poetry, in 2018, despite the fact that “most people’s lives are consumed by their jobs.” His corpus is something of a corrective.