Most of my friends, even the ones who share many of my interests, hate the books I recommend to them (at least for the first fifteen pages). Probably because I have an unconscious addiction to the trauma of being dropped into a confusing situation. Something about replicating birth. When I first meet a book, I like it to make me feel out of place. I like to feel the structure or language push up against me and be totally unsure about its rightness or wrongness. Andrew Weatherhead’s latest book of poetry, $50,000, has made me feel what all my favorite books do. What begins with jarring confusion over form transformed this reader into a believer in the pace and texture of the mundane. In this case, the form is soul-crushing formulaic pithiness. But, by the end, I was gripped by the genuine connection we often only feel when we meet those who are lonely in the ways we have also been lonely. 

On a surface read, the book appears to the reader as either a 100-ish page singular poem with non-typical, dead even spacing between each stanza, or a collection of Zen-adjacent contemporary wisdoms collected and assembled in almost Dadaist fashion. Upon closer reading, however, I was impressed by the way in which form met function. The book paces itself to the point of frustration because it is offering us the chance to encounter each line as its own reality. The reader is confronted by the way in which these facts simultaneously exist yet seem as though they are mutually exclusive. In the end, we, along with the author, “Can’t tell the difference between wisdom gained with / age and an increasingly sophisticated construct of / narcissism and self-justification” (71). But in the end, their formal likenesses make either option acceptable. 

The book’s subject matter? Difficult to pinpoint, but something between the long, winding, passive-aggressive email your roommate writes you with all the names removed (76) and “The long, slow descent into yourself from which you / may never recover” (63). The strange emotional tissue that connects the often seemingly disparate aphorisms is a deep sense of anxiety around the quest for deeper meaning at the heart of late-capitalist work-life balance in the United States. These glimpses of a life lived mostly in an office—and the ways in which the office has come to live in us—invite the reader to agree with Weatherhead when he says, “I need better words for my anxieties—big, horrible / words” (82). 

The book isn’t all critical theory and melancholia, though. I laughed out loud several times in the collection, like when Weatherhead says, “Twice this week I’ve seen people ask for the display / pastries at Starbucks, even after being told they were / only for display” (21). The humor in the book functions like the long and winding joke that wears down your senses until suddenly you’ll laugh at anything (even the things you’re not supposed to). Just like in contemporary office life, so in this collection of one-liners. Something said from a place of deep emotional conviction is mashed up next to something so trite that the result is a heartbreaking laugh. 

We can only assume the title is Weatherhead’s annual salary for a job—$50,000. I still couldn’t name what exactly it is the author does for work after two full reads. This is part of the brilliance of the title and the book. He is buying low and selling high on his own sorrows (84). And in doing so, he makes us wonder: what sorrows can we still afford at a salary of $50,000? What banalities have we slowly endured for less? $50,000 is a great number because it functions as a signifier for the new working-class citizens of some of perhaps the most dystopian cities on planet earth. With $50,000 a year, a worker is not poor enough to complain, but not wealthy enough to afford any kind of freedom from the cause of complaint. It’s only enough cash to self-medicate against the constant anxiety that we might never have enough. To buy books and buy ourselves just barely enough time to skim them and do as Andrew does: “sit home and justify all my flaws with what I / remember of Zen Buddhism” (66). 

– Brandon Meland