David Dominguez, Work Done Right, poetry, reviews

Three Reviews

My most sincere thanks to the people who have reviewed Work Done Right

—David Dominguez

Why I Want to Talk about David Dominguez

by Gary Soto

www.garysoto.com

I feel like a turncoat when I say I’m more enamored by prose than poetry, that these days my literary life involves biography and novel reading. But I do have an exception in the form of Fresno-native David Dominguez’s Work Done Right, published this spring by the University of Arizona Press. It is an exquisite book to hold, and I, along with many other poets, am in awe of terrific-looking books. This is what first attracts us to this collection—its cover design and literal weight that is neither light nor heavy. For its good looks alone this book promises to be a winner. But once the cover is cracked open, the reader discovers one of the best—if not the best—first books of poems in a decade. Dominguez has accomplished something masterful and true, and I believe it has to do with his concentration on line and image, and of his ambition to link one long story around… sausage. To say that he writes well is not a good enough comment; it’s his attention to the form of the poem and his exquisite delivery with its bag of surprises. This is how I first viewed his work. I looked to see how he composed the poem and then later read the poems for their story. We’re treated to “Mi Historia,” a poem that covers his mother’s history in the fields around Mendota, California when she hauled a long, heavy, canvas sack as she worked. This was probably the early fifties when Mexicans, Okies, and a few blacks bowed to the agricultural Inquisition called picking cotton. Dominguez writes of his mother’s toil and—damn it!—he wants his own toil. He says:

I wanted my own history — not the earth's,
nor the history of blood, nor of memory,
and not the job found for me at Galdini Sausage.
I sought my own — a new bruise to throb hard
as the asphalt that pounded the chassis of my truck.

Dominguez suspects that he can live out a young man’s anger in a truck, that he can burn rubber from Fresno all the way to Mendota, a thirty-mile journey. What of it? For a young man, that may not be enough. For a young poet, it’s only an afternoon on the page. Dominguez, like many of the intelligent Mexican Americans of his generation, may feel that he missed la causa or el movimiento, that he was not part of some lasting struggle—the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the UFW, for instance, established hiring halls throughout rural California. His generation is the generation of strip malls and the comeback (and disappearance, we hope) of John Travolta. It’s Madonna, the self-parodying anger of Jesse Jackson, the greed of corporations like the Ford Motor Company which taunts itself as environment-friendly. (Yeah, right.)

We can’t time our births, and Dominguez sighs as he believes that he missed a crucial moment in history. Perhaps he searches for a “new bruise.” But will his life remain dull and conventional? No, thank god. He finds his coming-of-age as a grunt worker in a sausage factory in Fresno. This is what the collection is about—work among uncomplaining men in an awkward stumble. In fact, the whole book refers to work. Let’s look at one poem titled “Fingers,” where a man named Julio stuffs himself down a machine to fix a jam and loses a small part of himself, an index finger. In some ways Julio momentarily resembles a sausage as he nearly disappears into the inners of the machine. The man resurfaces, buries his severed finger in a smock, and “push[es] away those who tried to help.” Dominguez, perhaps big-eyed with fright, questions his own courage. He writes:

But most of all, I thought about myself:
would I have screamed, could I have taken the pain,
walked outside to the employee pay phone
and, with my good hand still held steady, dialed 9-1-1?

The sausage factory is Dominguez’s test for himself. It’s not pretty-boy work, and it’s not even clean wholesome work, which at the end of a summer, a college student might say that he learned some valuable lesson about life. No, it’s work that is fly-busy, hot, foul, cold, slippery under foot, demeaning, leveling to a young man’s smart-aleck courage, and poor pay. We sometimes feel for Dominguez the young man, but mostly the reader sees Dominguez as an escuincle, a boyish man. He can’t keep up. He tires among workers who will have to do the same task years later while he—Dominguez—is elsewhere. In some regards this book is homage to Mexican workers. It’s homage to his family as well. He doesn’t keep up and at times is the brunt of comments in Spanish.

Again, this collection is about work and his own private struggle as he becomes a man by example. He lived a portion of his life making sausages and now he’s making poetry that is both meaty and peppered with the salts of life. This book is not for vegetarians.

Narrative poems sing praises of the working class

Rigoberto González
Special to the Times

Heir to the legacy of Gary Soto, Philip Levine, Juan Felipe Herrera and other California poets whose art rises from the raw beauty of the working-class experience, David Dominguez makes his impressive debut with a sequence of narrative poems titled Work Done Right (University of Arizona Press, $14.95 paperback.)

Given the biblical name Abraham, "father of all nations," and the surname Tovar, like the prized bulls, the speaker of this collection takes readers along his heart-wrenching journey to unravel a destiny that distinguishes him from his appellation. He makes his declaration in the poem "Mi Historia":

A dreamer, Abraham sets out for financial independence and finds employment with Galdini Sausage, only to discover the hardship and exhaustion of an industrial prison. From the production room, where "the grinder, mixer, stuffer, and wrapper" groan as the employees take their stations, to the brief respites at lunch when they eat, "the tired body taking back what the work took," to the inevitable overtime -- the mind is haunted by the images of pig blood, the imagination tainted by "thoughts of pork."

The routine tasks provide Abraham time to ruminate about family and Mexico. He romanticizes the particularities of rural life, such as his grandfather, his grandfather's guayabera, and his grandfather's ranchito:

How sometimes, under the stars rolling under barbed wire,

toward another day of work, and yet another,

the only thing worth touching

is something of home gracious enough to say,

“Close your eyes now and sleep.”

Although the pangs of nostalgia make him long for home, he feels the need to resist, move forward, and come to terms with his present, even if it's not what he expected. Abraham's maturity is helped along by seasoned workers like Guillermo:

Guillermo worked like a man who, up before dawn,

read the paper over juice and toast, and then,

as he walked the empty street

toward a factory that offered nothing,

realized there was nothing but work done right.

Abraham becomes attuned to the worker's plight and slowly recognizes that the world he desires is larger than what the factory offers. A tragic accident will be the greatest life lesson, severing Abraham's ties to Galdini Sausage. He will finally leave place and memory on his own terms, with a new-found appreciation for ephemeral life. And like the eucalyptus along Highway 99, he'll be "sloughing down to (the) skin for the stars," a wiser man.

The startling imagery of "the unyielding memory of pig" juxtaposed with Dominguez's perceptive insights on humanity create a moving tale of loss and redemption worth multiple readings.

"Work Done Right" is a coming-of-age story in verse and as captivating as a border corrido. Dominguez, the newest minstrel, sings it beautifully.

Rigoberto Gonzalez is the author of the poetry collection So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks and of Crossing Vines, a novel forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press.

Poet finds hope in a sausage factory
By Nzong Xiong
The Fresno Bee

For two summers, David Dominguez labored away in a sausage factory, learning about patience, hope and himself, which he chronicles in a just-published book.

"Making chorizo was hard work," says Dominguez, 31, who teaches creative writing and literature at Reedley College. "If you complained about it, you just made the morning longer. But if you just made the chorizo -- ground the meat as best you could, mixed the spices into the ground meat and then put it in the casing before boxing and shipping it out -- at the end, you could be proud of it because you made it the best you could."

His personal experiences are the subjects of "Work Done Right" (University of Arizona Press, $15.95), narrative poems about Abraham Tovar, a young man searching for his place in the world while working at a sausage factory. Dominguez, who lives in Fresno and plans to move soon to Kingsburg, is the eldest son of an elementary school teacher and retired principal. He says that he loved Dr. Seuss books as a child.

Before he started writing, Dominguez considered writing his experience in the nonfiction prose genre. But poetry pulled at him. "One thing that makes poetry magical is the music" of the words, says Dominguez. "Poetry gave me the chance to [show] the music and rhythm of work."

Dominguez worked at the sausage factory after receiving his bachelor's degree at the University of California at Irvine and before being awarded a master's degree by the University of Arizona. He won't say where the factory was, but he sets the story in the fictional town of Del Sol and makes enough references to the Valley to lead readers to believe the factory is here.

"The first summer, I worked there because I needed the job," he recalls of his sausage-making days. "The second summer, I went back because I enjoyed the friendship among the co-workers."

Through the main character in his book, Dominguez hopes to teach some of what he learned on the job.

"If there is one thing that I would hope a reader keeps after closing the book, it is hope," he says. "Hope for the future."