Poetry review – THE SCREW CITY POEMS: Charles Rammelkamp enjoys dipping into a comprehensive New & Selected from Richard Vargas
The Screw City Poems
Richard Vargas
Roadside Press, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9925009-3-6
$18.00, 136 pages
Richard Vargas explains in a candid introduction how his New and Selected collection became The Screw City Poems. They’re all connected with Rockford, Illinois – “a love/hate letter.” Sampling from five previous collections – McLife, American Jesus, Guernica, revisited, How a Civilization Begins, and leaving a tip at the Blue Moon Motel – The Screw City Poems also features the first seven chapters from a work-in-progress, which is prose fiction. Another prose selection, likewise an excerpt, “Paydazed,” from leaving a tip at the Blue Moon Motel, is set in Rockford. It reads more like memoir than fiction (“I’ve included an excerpt from a ‘creative non-fiction’ essay,” he writes in his Introduction, and goes on in his delightfully satiric way to tell us that CNF is really just “MFA speak” for “the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the truth may be enhanced.”), but the voice is just as pleasing, humorous and with that sense of authority that comes with a self-confident writer.
The Screw City is one of Rockford, Illinois’ nicknames, as Vargas mentions at the start of his work-in-progress, which takes place in Dinkford, not Rockford, a town that is split by the Wisheewaukee River rather than the Rock River. Rockford was dubbed Screw City because it was where almost ninety percent of the screws and fasteners essential to the war effort during World War Two were manufactured. Indeed, residents boasted that it was one of Hitler’s targets. Cripple Rockford and you cripple the U.S. war effort. That manufacturing has gone the way that the rest of the Rust Belt went.
But the word “screw” is deliciously ambiguous, with its suggestion of sex as well as back-stabbing, deceit and ruthlessness. There’s plenty of both sex and callous heartlessness in the poems and the prose.
The very first poem in the collection, “it’s a living,” is about screwing desperate people over as a “customer service representative” for a medical insurance company. The speaker is “trying to help my fellow man / make sense of the medical insurance,” but he knows the deck is stacked against the customer, in this case a guy whose wife is being kicked out of the hospital (“please he said / please ask them to stop / she’s in so much pain”). But of course the customer service rep. is just as helpless as the caller. He, too, resents the people who “put dollar signs / on the way we die” and can only try to reassure the caller. The customer service rep feels ineffectual, a fraud; he is likewise getting screwed, the job taking a hit on his self-esteem, as the title suggests.
The next poem, “laid off,” takes aim at the employees themselves as the company is letting them go – screwing them – for the sake of the bottom line. The three “McLife” poems included in the sampling underscore the fundamental heartlessness and injustice of the system. In one, an elderly guy has been reduced to wearing a McDonalds uniform, flipping burgers and taking orders from teenagers as he’s lost his job, “downsized” by the guys in expensive suits who’ve “pulled his medical insurance / like a rug from under his feet.”
But there are other poems from the same collection about love gone sideways, a cosmic form of getting screwed; “turning into strangers” and “divorce me” both deal with the end of a relationship. Another poem, “how it was,” likewise considers the end of love, comparing it in an extended metaphor to driving a race car. It ends:
that’s
how it was
the day
i left you
Poems from the point of view of a single man, the frustrations and allure of the opposite sex – waitresses, hairdressers, single moms, exotic dancers – fill out the picture. Some of the poems – notably, “nature poem…for Amy,” “her first porno,” and “waiting in line at Logli’s…Rockford, IL” – are downright humorous.
Poems from American Jesus develop these same themes, but coming a few years later (McLife was published in 2005, American Jesus in 2007), the lessons are graver, the sense of remorse deeper. In “It’s so easy to be a poet / and so hard to be / a man” (a title taken from Charles Bukowski) the speaker receives a call from his ex, full of bitterness and recrimination.
her words flew by like dirty panties
packed with rocks
I heard it all
self-centered/ selfish/ righteous
uncaring….
But the speaker does not rise to the bait. He does not argue and fling names back. The woman has just buried her father. All he can do is listen and wallow in his guilt and regret.
“The Women at C.J.’s” are all divorcees on the rebound (“maybe 2 or 3 divorces / to my one”), and it’s like walking through a minefield. But in “Driving to O’Hare” and “Driving to Plattesville,” the speaker relishes the simple conversation of older friends, outside the combat of the sexual arena. In “On the Outside” the poet reflects on his contemporaries, adults with kids, jobs, responsibilities:
watching them become their parents
i can’t help but feel i screwed up
Only later, reflecting further on how his life has gone, he observes,
when I’m up ’til the wee
hours chasing the perfect poem
can feel its steamy heat brush my cheek
or when I wake up beside a beautiful woman
her gentle snore music to my ears
then it all makes sense and
i give praise to the gods
who took a liking to me
singled me out
pointed me in the direction
I was meant to take
The short selection from Guernica revisited (2014) – six poems – all deal with women, getting along with them or often not, but it ends on the hopeful “wedding song for Lily and Chris,” in honor of friends’ nuptials. The poem concludes on the idealistic note “that maybe, just maybe
there is still enough love
left in this big whirling
ball of dysfunction
to go around
for the rest of us
Dream on!
Charles Bukowski (“What would Buk do?” from How a Civilization Begins), Gerald Locklin (“for an old teacher, an old friend” from McLife), Edward Field (who wrote a foreword for McLife), and Joy Harbo (the poet laureate who blurbed Guernica revisited), maverick poets all, are the luminaries whose aesthetic and political perspectives inform Vargas’ work.
Though I’ve known Richard Vargas for close to two decades now – since he edited The Más Tequila Review – I can’t say I’m one of those readers to whom he refers in his Introduction, the ones who have read all his books (“Has anyone read all of them? Buy that man a beer.”). But I am grateful for the opportunity to read his “new and selected” collection for the humor and the humanity and the guarded optimism that colors his outlook. As he writes in his epilogue, reviewing his life thus far, summing it all up:
the feeling in my gut
reassuring me
there were better
days to come.
Jul 22 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Richard Vargas
Poetry review – THE SCREW CITY POEMS: Charles Rammelkamp enjoys dipping into a comprehensive New & Selected from Richard Vargas
Richard Vargas explains in a candid introduction how his New and Selected collection became The Screw City Poems. They’re all connected with Rockford, Illinois – “a love/hate letter.” Sampling from five previous collections – McLife, American Jesus, Guernica, revisited, How a Civilization Begins, and leaving a tip at the Blue Moon Motel – The Screw City Poems also features the first seven chapters from a work-in-progress, which is prose fiction. Another prose selection, likewise an excerpt, “Paydazed,” from leaving a tip at the Blue Moon Motel, is set in Rockford. It reads more like memoir than fiction (“I’ve included an excerpt from a ‘creative non-fiction’ essay,” he writes in his Introduction, and goes on in his delightfully satiric way to tell us that CNF is really just “MFA speak” for “the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the truth may be enhanced.”), but the voice is just as pleasing, humorous and with that sense of authority that comes with a self-confident writer.
The Screw City is one of Rockford, Illinois’ nicknames, as Vargas mentions at the start of his work-in-progress, which takes place in Dinkford, not Rockford, a town that is split by the Wisheewaukee River rather than the Rock River. Rockford was dubbed Screw City because it was where almost ninety percent of the screws and fasteners essential to the war effort during World War Two were manufactured. Indeed, residents boasted that it was one of Hitler’s targets. Cripple Rockford and you cripple the U.S. war effort. That manufacturing has gone the way that the rest of the Rust Belt went.
But the word “screw” is deliciously ambiguous, with its suggestion of sex as well as back-stabbing, deceit and ruthlessness. There’s plenty of both sex and callous heartlessness in the poems and the prose.
The very first poem in the collection, “it’s a living,” is about screwing desperate people over as a “customer service representative” for a medical insurance company. The speaker is “trying to help my fellow man / make sense of the medical insurance,” but he knows the deck is stacked against the customer, in this case a guy whose wife is being kicked out of the hospital (“please he said / please ask them to stop / she’s in so much pain”). But of course the customer service rep. is just as helpless as the caller. He, too, resents the people who “put dollar signs / on the way we die” and can only try to reassure the caller. The customer service rep feels ineffectual, a fraud; he is likewise getting screwed, the job taking a hit on his self-esteem, as the title suggests.
The next poem, “laid off,” takes aim at the employees themselves as the company is letting them go – screwing them – for the sake of the bottom line. The three “McLife” poems included in the sampling underscore the fundamental heartlessness and injustice of the system. In one, an elderly guy has been reduced to wearing a McDonalds uniform, flipping burgers and taking orders from teenagers as he’s lost his job, “downsized” by the guys in expensive suits who’ve “pulled his medical insurance / like a rug from under his feet.”
But there are other poems from the same collection about love gone sideways, a cosmic form of getting screwed; “turning into strangers” and “divorce me” both deal with the end of a relationship. Another poem, “how it was,” likewise considers the end of love, comparing it in an extended metaphor to driving a race car. It ends:
Poems from the point of view of a single man, the frustrations and allure of the opposite sex – waitresses, hairdressers, single moms, exotic dancers – fill out the picture. Some of the poems – notably, “nature poem…for Amy,” “her first porno,” and “waiting in line at Logli’s…Rockford, IL” – are downright humorous.
Poems from American Jesus develop these same themes, but coming a few years later (McLife was published in 2005, American Jesus in 2007), the lessons are graver, the sense of remorse deeper. In “It’s so easy to be a poet / and so hard to be / a man” (a title taken from Charles Bukowski) the speaker receives a call from his ex, full of bitterness and recrimination.
But the speaker does not rise to the bait. He does not argue and fling names back. The woman has just buried her father. All he can do is listen and wallow in his guilt and regret.
“The Women at C.J.’s” are all divorcees on the rebound (“maybe 2 or 3 divorces / to my one”), and it’s like walking through a minefield. But in “Driving to O’Hare” and “Driving to Plattesville,” the speaker relishes the simple conversation of older friends, outside the combat of the sexual arena. In “On the Outside” the poet reflects on his contemporaries, adults with kids, jobs, responsibilities:
Only later, reflecting further on how his life has gone, he observes,
The short selection from Guernica revisited (2014) – six poems – all deal with women, getting along with them or often not, but it ends on the hopeful “wedding song for Lily and Chris,” in honor of friends’ nuptials. The poem concludes on the idealistic note “that maybe, just maybe
there is still enough love left in this big whirling ball of dysfunction to go around for the rest of usDream on!
Charles Bukowski (“What would Buk do?” from How a Civilization Begins), Gerald Locklin (“for an old teacher, an old friend” from McLife), Edward Field (who wrote a foreword for McLife), and Joy Harbo (the poet laureate who blurbed Guernica revisited), maverick poets all, are the luminaries whose aesthetic and political perspectives inform Vargas’ work.
Though I’ve known Richard Vargas for close to two decades now – since he edited The Más Tequila Review – I can’t say I’m one of those readers to whom he refers in his Introduction, the ones who have read all his books (“Has anyone read all of them? Buy that man a beer.”). But I am grateful for the opportunity to read his “new and selected” collection for the humor and the humanity and the guarded optimism that colors his outlook. As he writes in his epilogue, reviewing his life thus far, summing it all up: