Reduction in Force: Poems

Dos Santos probes the cold, bureaucratic corporate world to reveal how betrayal reshapes the American dream.

In a literary moment when so much lyric poetry seems preoccupied with private experience and ready-made epiphany, Hugo Dos Santos’s Reduction in Force is revelatory. It is, yes, an examination of the self, but it performs its review through lenses and landscapes that are rarely utilized in poetry, which is to say the cold and bureaucratized reality of the American corporate world, and...