Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Teacher/Pizza Guy
    Teacher/Pizza Guy
    Teacher/Pizza Guy
    Ebook129 pages2 hours

    Teacher/Pizza Guy

    By Jeff Kass

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Teacher/Pizza Guy is a collection of autobiographical poems from the 2016–17 school year in which Jeff Kass worked as a full-time English teacher and a part-time director for a literary arts organization and still had to supplement his income by delivering pizzas a few nights a week. In the collection, Kass is unapologetically political without distracting from the poems themselves but rather adds layers and nuances to the fight for the middle class and for educators as a profession.

    The timing of this book is beyond relevant. As a public high school teacher in America, Kass’s situation is not uncommon. In September 2018, Time published an article detailing how many public school teachers across the country and in a variety of environments work multiple jobs to help make ends meet. Teacher/Pizza Guy chronicles Kass’s experience of teaching, directing, feeding people, and treading the delicate balance of holding himself accountable to his wife and kids, his students, his customers, and his own mental and physical health while working three jobs in contemporary America. The journey of that year was draining, at times daunting, at times satisfying, but always surprising. Many of the ideas for these poems were initially scribbled onto the backs of pizza receipts or scratched out during precious free moments amidst the chaos of the school day. A driving force behind the book is Philip Levine’s poem "What Work Is," which Kass believes attempts to examine not only the dignity and complexity of what we think physical, tangible work is but also the exhausting, albeit sometimes fulfilling nature of emotional work.

    Teacher/Pizza Guy is a funny and relatable collection for readers, thinkers, educators, and pizza lovers everywhere.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWayne State University Press
    Release dateAug 26, 2019
    ISBN9780814347164
    Teacher/Pizza Guy

    Related to Teacher/Pizza Guy

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Q&A with poet Naomi Shihab Nye

      May 28, 2020

      How do parents keep kids learning and playing with words, even as online classes end? The Young People’s Poet Laureate has some ideas.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Winter reset

      Nov 14, 2020

      Winter reset
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Scent Of The Past

      Feb 2, 2023

      A Scent Of The Past
      4 min read

    • Article

      One Life

      Dec 27, 2018

      A Saturday night in December. You’re at the Basement, waiting for their annual Christmas show to start, and you’re really hoping it’s funny. The place is packed; you’re perched amid a chirruping nest of Aucklanders. To your left are a couple who will

      1 min read

    • Article

      Ritual and Renewal

      Sep 24, 2019

      Ritual and Renewal
      4 min read

    • Article

      This Is Your Face

      Jun 1, 2022

      NADIA DAVIDS is the author of the plays At Her Feet, Cissie, and What Remains and a novel, An Imperfect Blessing, which was shortlisted for Africa’s Etisalat Prize for Literature. You’re more assured than your fellow students, and I spend a lot of t

      24 min read

    • Article

      Home

      Feb 25, 2019

      I once lived in a yellow little house. Each morning, birds convened and sang at my bedroom window. The gate was indigo and inside the garden all kinds of flowers rose to kiss the sunny walls. The yellow nest was filled with cherished books, colourful

      5 min read

    • Article

      Wide Open

      May 7, 2020

      Wide Open
      5 min read

    • Article

      Muse Mail

      Nov 1, 2022

      Muse Mail
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Specificity of Art

      Oct 10, 2022

      Like most writers, Jill Madden Melchoir has been putting pen to paper for as long as she can remember. But perhaps unlike most writers, Melchoir’s writing didn’t start with stories or poems: “It was writing lists of stuff I liked, literally just list

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Letterbox

      Apr 1, 2020

      Dear Everybuggy, My nonna recently found my mom’s old Cricket magazines. I was reading them one day when a story from the October 1976 issue caught my eye. “Minnie Maloney and Macaroni” is about a family who buys seven boxes of macaroni every day for

      7 min read

    • Article

      Winning Letter

      Sep 8, 2023

      VERY few people would tell you they’re happy with the amount of time they have for, well, pretty much everything. Life is a constant juggle with every part of it requiring time and there just never seems to be enough of it. I was intrigued by the adv

      5 min read

    • Article

      Dear Justice

      Apr 13, 2023

      Dear Justice
      6 min read

    • Article

      Reunion

      Feb 4, 2021

      Reunion
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Teacher/Pizza Guy

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Teacher/Pizza Guy - Jeff Kass

      Advance praise for Teacher/Pizza Guy

      I never really cared for poetry, but I truly loved Kass’s work. He speaks to all of our insecurities and vulnerabilities, giving a voice to what we want to say but rarely do. Yes, teachers are struggling to get by financially, and it’s a shame that education is not being made a higher priority in our society. Thank you, Jeff, for opening the door to this conversation in a creative and enriching way.

      —David Hecker, president of AFT Michigan

      After twenty-plus years of teaching, I can say that these poems capture more of a teacher’s life than any news story, assigned manual, or documentary account ever could. To read them is to experience the inspiring, infuriating, hilarious, tedious, and quietly glorious lives lived by one teacher residing in the twenty-first century as a fully realized and flawed human being. They will speak to your heart and mind regardless of which side of the big desk you’ve ever been on.

      —Sean Sabo, teacher, Ann Arbor, Michigan

      "Kass’s hip-hop poetic style illuminates the gritty yet inspiring realities of teaching today’s youth, while at the same time working a second job to make ends meet. Teacher/Pizza Guy will resonate with those who have ever strived to make a difference, no matter with kids by day, pizzas at night, or both. Kass is a distinctive poet with insight and compassion who ultimately ‘chooses bliss.’"

      —Don Packard, English department chairperson, Ann Arbor Pioneer High School

      Here we have poems of labor, wages, busted knees, and the miracles of bodies at all. Forged out of economic precarity and the ways that such uncertainty shapes a life (its breaths, hours, delights, resistance), Kass’s poems strain toward what is broken, depleted, or overlooked, and find song there. These are not songs of repair, but songs that praise and document some of the effortful lasting, and attempts to last, of Kass’s most beloved subjects. In this way these poems carry the intimacy and goodbye of an elegy, the attentiveness of the ode, and the urgency of the protest cry.

      —Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria

      What a beautiful and moving and funny and un-heroic and angry and tender and honest book of poems about labor, aging, love, and, as Kass says, finding ‘meaning in every ice patch on the sidewalk.’ This book’s heart is enormous. I love it.

      —Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and The Book of Delights

      "Jeff Kass affirms the dignity and heartbreak of the working person with funny and deeply human turns and terms. A master storyteller, Kass reminds us in Teacher/Pizza Guy of the elasticity and liminality we negotiate in our relationships between teacher and student, working and working poor, life and death. Kass is in the middle of the country, a humble Hercules, trying to pull it all together with grace, beauty, and a touching humility. He will make you cry and laugh and remember to hold your head high and hope."

      —Kevin Coval, author of A People’s History of Chicago and Everything Must Go: The Life & Death of an American Neighborhood

      Made in Michigan Writers Series

      General Editors

      Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts

      M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University

      A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

      Teacher/Pizza Guy

      Poems by Jeff Kass

      Wayne State University Press

      Detroit

      © 2019 by Jeff Kass. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

      ISBN 978-0-8143-4715-7 (paperback)

      ISBN 978-0-8143-4716-4 (e-book)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2019936117

      Publication of this book was made possible by a generous gift from the Meijer Foundation. This work is supported in part by an award from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.

      Wayne State University Press

      Leonard N. Simons Building

      4809 Woodward Avenue

      Detroit, Michigan 48201–1309

      Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

      Contents

      I

      Oh, Splotch of Blue Paint

      It’s strange

      Today for the first time I notice

      Making the first milkshake

      My daughter can’t find her field hockey jersey

      Who stole the remote?

      Dough tray

      Something extra

      II

      Classroom door open

      The upside-down remote-control doorstop

      Purveyor of pies

      I don’t take yearbook photos anymore

      Marty blows up

      Wrong city ghazal

      Karma’s a fuckin’ bitch

      Leonard says his poems got rejected from the youth literary magazine

      Unworthy

      I’d be lying

      The manager talks about getting engaged

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1