The Art of Bagging
The Art of Bagging
The Art of Bagging
By Joshua Gottlieb-Miller
May 1, 2023 • 6 x 9 • x 132 pages • 978-1-7336020-9-9
“Do you think you would go out of your way to see an opera if it was about a grocery store?” Joshua Gottlieb-Miller asks at the very beginning of The Art of Bagging. What follows is extraordinary, lyrical, invigoratingly intelligent, and, indeed, operatic. In this hybrid collection, Gottlieb-Miller considers the grocery store as a site for meditations on vast economies, complex labor systems, and the ordinary, often nearly invisible, people who work within them. Always thoughtful and humane, the poems are uni ed by Gottlieb-Miller’s own voice—a voice characterized by wit, warmth, keen awareness, and a desire to understand the many worlds of the grocery store and those who labor alongside him, within it.
—Kevin Prufer
Photo credit: Asaeda Badat
JOSHUA GOTTLIEB-MILLER
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller earned his BA from St. Mary's College of Maryland, and his MFA and PhD from the University of Houston. He served as Poetry Editor and Digital Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast, as well as a Post-Harvey Think Tank Fellow for folklore at Rice University's Humanities Research Center. He has been awarded poetry fellowships at MacDowell, the Yiddish Book Center's Tent Workshop, and elsewhere. He has published poetry, nonfiction, hybrid, and multimedia writing, most recently in Brooklyn Rail, MAYDAY Magazine, Concision Poetry Journal, and Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts. He worked at Trader Joe's three times: once in Silver Spring, Maryland, and twice in Madison, Wisconsin. He currently teaches at San Jacinto College and lives in Houston with his wife and son.