Don Winter has a light touch. His poems are filled with sweat, heartbreak, whimsy and honesty. Winter has a reputation as a blue collar poet—a “working man’s” poet.  That is a label he embraces and is shown by poems here.

The core of this book is poems about working people doing what they do and living their lives with all the beauty, glory, pain and joy of being human. These poems include “Roofing” and “My Grandfather was a Matewan Miner” (with “teeth gone by thirty” and still in the mines “with each cough”). There is cleaning, cooking, quitting jobs, searching, searching for work, hammering, sweating, drinking, loving, needing, and faith in unions. There is also the art of making a task a work of art, such as perfecting a burger face with smile, nose, eyes and a hat made out of condiments. The art of the everyday is welcome and necessary and too often overlooked or taken for granted.

The final section of the book is an essay by Winter, “Press of the Real: Poetry of the Working Class,” which on its own is reason enough to read this book. This essay explores questions about the relationship between writing, art, academia and the working class. These questions include what are people programmed to be as children by our society and its instruments, why does the poetry taught in school not reflect the lives of the majority of the population—people who do blue collar jobs or work the land, is academia “voyeuristic” in its approach to the working class and working class writing, why did the author have to discover working class writers on his own before he could begin his own journey towards poetry, etc. There are more questions raised than answers provided. The essay will make you think, and, hopefully, change the minds of readers and critics with more elitist views on art.

Winter wears the label as a “blue collar” or “working class” poet as a badge of honor, and so he should.

However, labels can be limiting. Critics or readers put off by the term “blue collar” or “worker” would not just suffer from snobbery, they would miss out on the rich poetic experience that Winter offers beyond class awareness.

Winter has largely retired from publishing. His prior collections are hard to find. Cleaning Up at the Hamtramck Burger Chef may be the last opportunity for new readers to discover Winter’s language and phrasing, his natural music, and his camera-like eye. His poems are like black and white snapshots of the Midwest, and sometimes Alaska, the rust belt and the cold land of opportunity.

His music can be sad. There is much to be sorry for. Elegies are appropriate. Elegies for the midwest rust belt: “For years the land worked us, planned/ our cities like shotgun blasts./ Now it gives up, sinks/ between hills…/ We need a place/ to be what we have become” (from “Things About to Disappear”). Elegies for those damaged by divorce: “The train twists through Michigan:/ the yellow blur of farmhouses…/ All night I keep arriving/ in someone else’s childhood…” (from “No Visitation”). And elegies for the lost souls who linger on in a world that has somehow moved on and left them behind: