Award Winners
The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award - 2023
David Gorin
Salt for the Table, Steam for the Air
for Xu Lizhi (1990–2014)
There was a young poet at Foxconn
whose life went into a box.
On its day of release, you could see the police
keeping people in line.
And there’s his coffin riding the orange
conveyor belt of his youth,
and the mourners in pink work-suits,
each adding her spark or screw…
It is overtime tonight. The tears
fall through an aluminum funnel
and pass through a network of tubes:
salt for the table, steam for the air.
His poem on my phone replies
Who touches this touches a man.
This thing of power. When it dies
we plug it into the wall.
Hadara Bar-Nadav on David Gorin
“Salt for the Table, Steam for the Air” is a haunting elegy for Xu Lizhi, a beloved young poet and factory worker who was employed by the multinational electronics manufacturer Foxconn. Part Marxist-critique and part memorial, this poem explores the collision of human and mechanical worlds in finely wrought quatrains that bristle with cagey off-rhymes and evocative imagery. The poem insists on the humanity of the workers who add their own unique touch to the objects they manufacture, despite the dystopian factory in which they are trapped. In a simultaneously surreal, tender, and tragic gesture, the workers’ tears become part of the factory’s machines and are transformed into salt (sustenance) and steam (energy); however, this transformation comes at great human cost.
The poem insists on the ghostly presence of the deceased, whose words appear on a phone in the last stanza. This “thing of power” and “it” mentioned twice serve as striking understatement and enticing ambiguity. Is “it” the phone the speaker holds, the deceased poet, or poetry itself that plugs into a wall? Is the deceased writer finally free to roam beyond the factory walls via electricity or poetry, or is he forever trapped inside the machine for which he built parts?
Consider how we smear our own breath, words, desires, and griefs across phone screens to be transferred across cities, countries, worlds. How much of our lives are trapped or freed there? This stunning and expansive poem holds space for the elegized poet, for language, and for readers as we consider our dependence on technology, the complexities of human labor, and how we honor our beloveds long after they have gone.
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David Gorin's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in A Public Space, Boston Review, Bennington Review, Best American Experimental Writing, the PEN America Poetry Series, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received fellowship support from MacDowell and Millay Arts. In recent years, he has taught writing at the Pratt Institute, Deep Springs College, Eastern Correctional Facility (via the Bard Prison Initiative), and Yale University. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his partner Charlotte McCurdy and their hound dog, Odin.