From 1982 until 2002, Joe Weil worked as a tool grinder and union shop steward in a mold making plant in Kenilworth, New Jersey. Many of the poems in THE GREAT GRANDMOTHER LIGHT were written on the graveyard shift while on break at the factory. There, Weil read the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Ceasar Vallejo, Gabrielle Mistral, Miguel Hernandez, Robert Creely, Robert Kelly, and William Carlos Williams, as well as hundreds of contemporary poets. The poems in THE GRE...






















