The Screw City Poems by Richard Vargas (Roadside Press, 2025)
Richard Vargas’s The Screw City Poems is a fierce, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest collection that captures the dissonant beauty of working-class life in America. With a voice that blends raw grit with lyrical sensitivity, Vargas delivers poems rooted in lived experience—poems that hum with the machinery of factories, the ghosts of economic hardship, and the stubborn resilience of the human spirit.
Set against the backdrop of Rust Belt decay, The Screw City Poems pays tribute to the lives of laborers and dreamers in post-industrial America. Vargas, who has long chronicled the struggles and triumphs of the marginalized, brings a sharp eye and generous heart to this new terrain. The city itself becomes a character—haunted by its past glory, yet still pulsing with music, memory, and rebellion.
Vargas’s language is direct but never plain; his metaphors are grounded in the tactile world of grease-stained hands, dive bars, pickup trucks, and union halls. Poems are poignant without slipping into sentimentality, and always charged with a subtle, simmering anger at injustice. There’s humor here, too—bone-dry, sardonic, and disarming—offering relief and perspective amid the grind.
What elevates The Screw City beyond mere social commentary is Vargas’s gift for empathy. His portraits of everyday people—workers, drifters, lovers, family members—are rendered with dignity and grace. He doesn’t romanticize poverty or blue-collar hardship; instead, he captures the complexity and poetry of survival in a world that often refuses to see it.
Fans of Martín Espada, Diane Seuss, or Philip Levine will find kindred energy in Vargas’s work: an unrepentant celebration of the overlooked, the worn-down, and the beautifully defiant. The Screw City is a necessary book—one that reminds us poetry still has dirty hands, a hardhat, and something vital to say.
This collection is more than a lament; it’s a hymn to endurance, and a reminder that even in decline, there’s still music in the gears.
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
THE SCREW CITY POEMS by Richard Vargas is available for purchase wherever books are sold.
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