Basic Needs: Poems

Author: Vanessa Jimenez Gabb Publisher: Rescue Press (2021) "I will receive money once," begins Vanessa Jimenez Gabb's Basic Needs, a candid, sensitive inquiry into "love in the time of capitalism." Following from Gabb's debut collection, Images for Radical Politics, Basic Needs traces the alienations, catches, and contradictions of current life and work: No cogito ergo sum but "I am because I am having," and no direct actions but constant shivering consequences, "all of the little fires / freezing revolutions." Nevertheless, Gabb asserts, "to love / has not been more difficult // than deciding to." With formal fluctuation and complicated hope, the three movements of Basic Needs engage labor, love, and the lives we are able to create: "We have / our passions / and don't / know how / it will end," though it "cannot exist like this forever." "Anyone who has ever wondered what a Marxist love poem might look like need look no further than Vanessa Jimenez Gabb's Basic Needs. With its focus