Scraping Away

In his debut, full-length collection, Shaw drills down using a series of narrative poems to consider the cost (in something more than dollars) of what it takes to feed a starving public that often finds those in the service industry to be faceless and replaceable. The work here hopes to celebrate and humanize the millions of service workers as neighbors and loved ones doing labor that is often forgotten or misunderstood. Scraping Away looks to achieve this by considering the person as more than just their job, exploring complicated family relationships and the angst of a Rust Belt adolescence.

Fred Shaw is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and Carlow University, where he received his MFA.  He teaches writing and literature at Point Park University and Carlow University. His first collection, Scraping Away, released with CavanKerry Press in April 2020. A book reviewer and Poetry Editor for Pittsburgh Quarterly, his poem, “Argot,” is featured in the 2018 full-length documentary, Eating & Working & Eating & Working.  The film focuses on the lives of local service-industry workers. His poem “Scraping Away” was selected for the PA Public Poetry Project in 2017.  He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and rescued hound dog.

From “Argot”

On her days-off,
Mom wants to play Scrabble,
but instead, we talk about our fingers,
how they’ve split into open-flowered nerves,
stinging our bodies to the bulk

of a weary self at the end of the day,
each of us searching
for the phrase that captures what it is
to feel at once,
both capable and small.

From “Curse”

It took until senior year for me to balance
a full tray of steaming chow, elbow wobbling
until I learned to spread fingers wide, hoisting
the fiberglass oval on the level plain
of my palm, held steady above my right shoulder.

And when the boss said to hustle, I wore
a ready smile and worked without pause, buffing
lipstick from wine glass rims, scooping up
what was left behind—spoons and mugs half-full of cold coffee,
chicken bones and change, once a slimy denture.

Turn the first page of this gritty, faithful book, and you’re smack in the middle of the working class, with poem titles like Curse, The Price of Labor, Slugger, Wrist Rocket, Iron City Sage. Fred Shaw scrapes away artifice and leaves us with a real-life voice: …I’m keeping ice-bins full /and counters clean, wondering, at times, /if the routine has replaced the oxygen /of my dreams with a working life. These poems vibrate with back-against-the-wall power from a man who speaks himself into being:  I stand at the core of potential energy, and …Some days we gather ammo, /iron ore pellets that fall from coke cars/piled high and headed down to the ovens. What is the cost of a life? Fred Shaw writes the pride and dignity of class with a vernacular that can’t be faked, forced, or created—only breathed from the hands of a worker, from body to page.
—Jan Beatty, Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press

I can’t scrape out of my head the jack-hammering of Fred Shaw’s bold new volume, Scraping Away. Its yearning beat is indelible, inscribing the ether in a long wake of testimony. Shaw’s been paying attention: to the grit and grease his people wear like praise, the sound of their last two nickels scraped against each other, sparking a conflagration of rev and witness.  He’s been punching in, and he’s got the spine and will to scriven it all into words as real as concrete and rebar, shots and beers after the dead man’s shift: He’s got a jazzman’s ear and a millwright’s heart – and, more than anything, Fred Shaw reminds us that poetry is the province of light, the province of truth. I love these poems. They make me “hunger [for] a constant moon, / one that could hover / and hold still time / before places and days like these are all gone.”
—Joseph Bathanti, NC Poet Laureate (2012-2014) & author of East Liberty

88 pages
Fred Shaw
Pub date – April 7, 2020
Trade paper – 6 X 9″
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-78-5
Poetry