The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of Neoliberalism
The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring
Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End

Phil A. Neel’s 2018 book Hinterland could easily have been included in this review. The book tracks social upheaval from the long downturn begun in 1973 to the class dynamics of the contemporary economic hinterland in the United States. Neel’s book analyzes the hard facts of unemployment alongside the incapacities of the political class to correct the ongoing social catastrophe. In her 2018 Los Angeles Review of Books review “Wageless Life,” cultural materialist Sarah Brouillette situates Neel’s book within an emergent body of critical scholarship focused on the ruins of the Keynesian gambit and the ongoing ravages of capital accumulation, which includes Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (2007), Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot (2016), and Annie McClanahan’s Dead Pledges (2017). I am compelled to add further recent publications and forthcoming manuscripts to my reading list in order to develop a response adequate to the three texts I have been tasked...