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The Saints of Capitalism by Benjamin Schmitt (review)

2023; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/abr.2023.a906515

2153-4578

Mixby Dickon,

Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy

Reviewed by: The Saints of Capitalism by Benjamin Schmitt Mixby Dickon (bio) THE SAINTS OF CAPITALISM Benjamin Schmitt New Meridian Arts https://www.newmeridianarts.com/the-saints-of-capitalism 120 pages; Print, $18.00 In her blurb for The Saints of Capitalism, Kristi Coulter writes that the collection highlights Benjamin Schmitt "at his headlong, urgent, desperately funny best." When I first set out to review this book, I wasn't expecting its critique of capitalism to incorporate humor. What was even more unexpected was how masterfully the humor was weaved into the collection, all without devaluing the seriousness of the subject matter. While touching on themes of desperation and melancholy amidst a growing void of income inequality, Schmitt's speakers maintain a sharp wit that cuts with both satire and surgical precision. With humor and humanity, these speakers tell the stories of everyday lives, turning the mundane into an epic of survival in a capitalist hellscape. What makes this collection's use of humor stand out is not the use of humor itself but how delicately it is used. These poems tell the stories of people surviving, by any means necessary, in a system that, more often than not, is designed to resist their upward mobility. While this is hardly a joking matter, the speakers in these poems direct their wit to punch up instead of punching down. At no point in this collection does it feel as if the suffering of everyday people is the subject of a joke; rather, the speakers use their wits to highlight the absurdity of the system making them suffer. This is often done using analogies of religious iconography. This can be observed in a poem called "Creed," which appears early in the collection. The speaker of this poem has no wasted motion as he or she immediately leans into the satire, saying, "Jesus died / so that billionaires / could get a tax cut." In keeping with the religious analogy, the poem itself follows the litany form, a poetic form that often uses repetition of phrases ("Jesus died" in this poem) and may also mimic a call-and-response structure. As the poem continues, the function of the analogy becomes increasingly clear. It is successfully leveraged to highlight the absurdity of combining [End Page 150] traditional religion with images of violence and greed. Religious worship is juxtaposed against worship of the rich, worship of guns, and the fear of outsiders to highlight the cognitive dissonance between these images and a religious figure who taught a creed of peace, humility, and loving one's neighbor. Additionally, the use of humor in this poem is juxtaposed against the seriousness of the content matter. In the third stanza, the speaker says: Jesus diedfor FreedomFreedom is the nickname Alfred WrightEarned at the University of Wisconsin in 1977when he brought a shotgun to Chemistry class In the next stanza the speaker offers the reader some levity, saying, "Jesus died / so that our team could beat your team / unless of course your team is our team." Schmitt's speakers often use humor and serious commentary in alternating waves. The litany form in this poem works in the service of this trend with each repetition of "Jesus died" creating a new branch of commentary, humorous or otherwise, and sometimes both. Despite Schmitt's use of humor in the collection there are also moments of pure humanity and tenderness, such as in "Upward." In this poem, the speaker reflects on the future of his infant son in an uncertain future. Without a hint of irony, the speaker in this poem expresses unadulterated love for his child as seen in the poem's opening lines: My son, as I hold you in my armsI can't stop my mind from consideringthe issues of the day. But yourlittle body pulls me back. The reader cannot help but to empathize with the speaker, as he reflects on the future safety of his son, saying, "And [I wonder] what kind of man you'll be—/ not all white so I fear not alright." These lines bring to bear aspects of our current public consciousness, namely, the treatment of people of...