Casual Labor: a Tale

A poetic tale of the growth and struggle of a laborer who became a professor and a technical writer, along with the angels and ghosts who helped and haunted his path, and the call to poetry that never left him. That path follows Stephen Dzerko as a recently divorced and broke and rebellious aspiring poet with little certainty in front of him. His path leads to years of rambling, uncertain blue collar jobs, near death in industrial accidents, and the family strangeness for those coming of age in the 60s. The book traces the unusual path he took from laborer to working, albeit reluctantly, in higher education. Casual Labor is really a tale made up of other tales. Rather than a linear narrative, the tale is organized thematically, with sections such as The Laborer's Dream; A Little Strange; Visitations; The Art of Lostness; Angels, Ghosts & Kindred Spirits; A Little Sensitive to Light; Politics & Death; and When the Heart Speaks, Take Good Notes.

Stephen Experiences danger and heartche as he seeks to find what one reviewer described this way: In its overall structure, Casual Labor is an autobiographical story of questing, a mighty effort to find, by writing, the unity of a life that often seems to be in chaos: directionless or even flying apart. The language of its prose and the language of its poetry exquisitely capture the movement between the mundane and the mysterious that Steph negotiates throughout his search to make sense of his experience and that of his parents, whose unconditional but often bewildered love for him, and his memory of that love, sustains him when all else crumbles away. It was a tale that needed to be told, full of wonder and sadness, that asks the reader to participate in Steph's explorations of a "laboring" life from a post-War childhood through the Viet Nam years and after; through "searching for love in all the wrong places"; through grappling with experiences whose moral is "life isn't fair"; to a present that leaves him still pondering life in a universe without the comforts of the Church, where language itself leads him to the only order there is.