Joshua Gottlieb-Miller: “I worked three different stints at Trader Joe’s, where the poem included here was inspired. I’ve always been an abstract thinker of a poet, and the grocery store grounded me in the textures and mundanity of every day. After my last stint at Trader Joe’s, I started a project where I recorded the coworkers quoted in these poems reading aloud the poems they were quoted in, and then I interviewed them about their lives. Many of the poems I wrote at the grocery store were informed by my sense of visibility or invisibility, and of course, during this pandemic, grocery store workers are both hyper-visible—recognized as essential—without always being seen as individuals. More recently, I’ve found myself in a service position at The Menil Collection, greeting visitors. I am, in writing this note, shocked to discover I’ve been writing and revising poems about the grocery store for a decade now.”
