The Work Is Done When We Are Dead - by Jade Wallace (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Work Is Done When We Are Dead, Jade Wallace's sophomore poetry collection, considers work in all its many forms, with a particular interest in types of labour that are unpaid, underappreciated, or even entirely unrecognized. Wallace's poems, by turns frantic and playful, lyric and experimental, probe at how the diffuse responsibilities we have to ourselves and one another might all be interpreted as kinds of labour, and ask whether that is a fruitful framework for our lives. The Work Is Done When We Are Dead is a collection that is as poetically indulgent as it is urgently existential.

Review Quotes

The Work is Done When We are Dead pins up the minds and bodies of modern-day capitalism to examine how deeply work is ingrained in our lives. Clever and curious, Wallace reintroduces the world of labour with a menagerie of characters--from landlords to snails--finding as much truth in fantasy as they do in receipts. Dying as we are every second, Wallace still promises, however, that 'death is never wasted.

----Farah Ghafoor, author of Shadow Price, shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards, and a CBC Best Book of 2025

By turns attuned to the minutiae of the lyrical moment and restlessly expansive, rigorously formal and form bendingly experimental, always richly textured and alive to the possibilities and musicality of language, the poems in Jade Wallace's sophomore collection are a heterodox delight. Ranging across subject matter as varied as the precarity of the modern workplace, the poet's relationship with their father and the breathing mechanisms of sharks, wielding biblical references and scientific facts with equal facility, The Work is Done When We Are Dead is a consistently surprising and deeply satisfying collection.

----Aaron Schneider, author of The Supply Chain, professor, & publisher of The Temz Review & 845 Press

Jade Wallace folds the entire workforce of the world - beings who have toiled across vocations, eras, and bodies - into the fluid 'I' of this collection by drawing on reverent poetic dexterity and inexhaustible empathy. The Work Is Done When We Are Dead is an exquisite choreography of diction and syntax, performed by Wallace with ease despite the obvious care-full, worthwhile labour at its heart. Rich reservoirs of consciousness-sparking philosophy on the chronic pressures of 'the grind' in all its forms and farcical symptoms pool across these poems. But Wallace doesn't claim to have some sapient, definitive answer to the question of work's role in our routines, rituals, bodies, and relationships. And they certainly aren't asking to be rewarded for propagating their hard-earned wisdom. This kind of steady, precise poetry only happens when someone does the work of writing, not to make contentment possible, but as an essential organ of it.

----Molly Cross-Blanchard, author of Exhibitionist, shortlisted for the ReLit 2022 Poetry Award, & creative writing instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University

About the Author

Jade Wallace is a poet, novelist, and literary critic whose books include: two poetry collections, most recently The Work Is Done When We Are Dead (Guernica Editions, 2026); a genderless novel, ANOMIA (Palimpsest Press, 2024); and, three collaborative poetry collections under the name MADE, most recently ZZOO (Palimpsest Press, 2025).