LEE BAINS: (Reading) The Quick Split closed one day without warning. Its hand-painted sign had read, chitterlings and steam table and since 19-something, I think I remember. I can't find any pictures on the internet.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
And that's Lee Bains reading from "Meat-And-Threes," part of a new collection of poetry titled "Work Lunch."
BAINS: (Reading) My brother heard the landlord had jacked up the rent, as they had up and down the forlorn blocks. From the other side of the mountain, something called a restaurant group installed a franchise into the old space. It couldn't have been scarcely cold yet. They called it Soul Kitchen. I'm told the soul is what is left when a body dies.
SIMON: And across more than a dozen poems, Lee Bains laments over the shuttering of so many mom-and-pop restaurants, shares memories of his family's favorite foods and recounts time spent with his immigrant co-workers. Bains works as a laborer and handyman in Atlanta, Georgia, and is also a touring musician. The premise of his poetry is often the ritual of taking in a meal on a break from a job.
Lee Bains joins us now from Atlanta. Thanks so much for being with us.
BAINS: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: What do you find so compelling about a work lunch?
BAINS: A lunch break in the middle of the day for me, when I'm working, is sort of a return to being human without concern for productivity or focus on the job immediately at hand. Just stepping aside from work, even for just a few minutes - and even more so the longer I take or the more that I'm around other people - the more that I can reconnect with my humanity and the humanity of those around me.
SIMON: A theme you keep touching on in "Work Lunch" is how small, locally owned restaurants have been disappearing. Property's been bought up by corporations.
BAINS: Yes, sir.
SIMON: How does that affect the people who've gone there for lunch for years?
BAINS: Well, I know for me, it affects me by making it that much harder to forge those community connections - not just community with the people who are running the businesses, but also interrupts the connections with people in the neighborhood, whether they work in the neighborhood or live in the neighborhood. I tried to start with the experience itself and see what it was telling me about our world and the way that our country's changing.
SIMON: You write about working and eating lunch with workers who happen to be immigrants, who make up now 30% of the construction laborers' workforce. What do you want readers to understand about that?
BAINS: A lot of these guys who I've come to know have embodied, not just in their lives but also in the way they've worked on the job site with each other and with me, a lot of the values that I was raised with. And I just think so often, a lot of our neighbors who come to our country from Latin America are characterized as anything but that by people in power.
SIMON: What do you learn, do you think, by sharing meals with people who are part of your community but not part of your family, but there is a special relationship there?
BAINS: The food itself is a basis of conversation and connection. You know? So in one poem, some co-workers and I go to a Cuban restaurant. And all of these co-workers - as I recall, anyway - were from either Alabama or Georgia. And we're sitting in a Cuban restaurant. Some guys have never eaten Cuban food before. And we're eating this plate of delicious pork with rice and beans. And, you know, the first bite, you hear that - mm. And somebody says, you know, man, this is like barbecue. And somebody else - yeah. It is like that.
In another instance, I remember a job where it was a Spanish-speaking crew of a few guys who were very recent immigrants to the U.S. who hadn't really eaten food from here. They had moved to a part of the Atlanta Metro where there were plenty of grocery stores and restaurants opened and run by people from their part of the world, and so that's usually what they were eating for lunch. And so I got to introduce these guys to things like cornbread or Southern fried chicken or collard greens, you know, and they introduced me to some of the food from their part of Central America. And all of a sudden, these boundaries and borders just start to fall away, and we begin to see that we have so much more in common than we do different.
SIMON: Yeah. Your songwriting and poetry - both a lot about what we call the working class, and often groups of people who can feel overlooked. What do you think being seen in art can do for people?
BAINS: I think I can really only speak for my experience. And when I think about times that I have read or heard or seen art that I feel a kinship to or a sense of reflection in, there's a feeling to me of both grounding and affirmation and realization. I think about the first times that I heard people sing in the accents of the people that I lived around and the way that that hit me.
SIMON: I got to ask. If we were both in Atlanta today, what would - what place would you suggest for lunch?
BAINS: Well, it's a place called Manuel's Tavern. It is just a couple of - three or four blocks from the Little Five Points neighborhood of Atlanta. And it is really a torchbearer for the type of bar, restaurant, meeting space that, when you walk in, will be filled with everybody from the mechanic down the street to people who are working at the capital downtown, passing artists to local organizers, and is really the kind of not only place to sit and eat, but a place to sit and listen that is too rapidly either vanishing from our landscape or is going underappreciated.
SIMON: That place sounds worth a poem. I hope you get to it.
BAINS: (Laughter) Yes, sir (laughter). It is definitely worth a poem.
SIMON: The songwriter and poet Lee Bains has joined us. His new collection of poems, "Work Lunch," is out now. Thank you so much for being with us.
BAINS: Oh, thank you so much for having me. Very honored.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "(IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE) 40-HOUR WEEK")
LEE BAINS AND THE GLORY FIRES: (Singing) We head to work, and we work till we get off work. Then we take it to the house from work. Hit the kitchen, and we get to work. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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