Book Review: Dreaming of North Beach (from Corporate America)

Reviewed by Mandy Bach

A striking collection about a speaker lost in the hollowing world of corporate America

Dreaming of North Beach (from Corporate America) looks at the way Americans think about and interact with the work they spend so much of their lives doing.

The speaker of the poems takes long drives; he wreaks havoc in dive bars until the early hours of the morning. He starts bar fights against his better judgment, and imagines himself a famous and desired musician. Readers are brought into the speaker’s rapidly dissolving life as he spends his long working hours restless and annoyed and his fleeting off-hours frantically trying to feel as if he is alive at all.

The first part of the collection works to establish a sense of dehumanization that is attributed to the kind of work the speaker does in corporate America. Names are turned into archetypes: “We needed more Madisons but hired too many Todds,” and we watch a series of characters who attended hilariously named fake universities get devoured by the corporate mouth, one-by-one falling prey to a world that doesn’t care for their personalities or backgrounds.

Readers sense the dehumanization even at the language level: the poem “Corporate America #2” is a kind of collage of words and phrases one may find in a corporate office or email thread, which left me with an expertly manufactured sense of foreboding that followed me throughout the rest of the collection.

The poem “The Entrepreneur” provides us with another, much grimmer example of this same idea, one that features a man who dreams of opening a restaurant committing suicide when his restaurant loan is declined. These poems are precisely intentional in establishing the way that corporate America strips individuals of the wonderful things that make them human: their passions, their interpersonal relationships, and even just their free time.

Amidst the speaker’s apparent frustration with his corporate life, we see moments of him reaching out for intimacy and closeness with those around him. The poem “Don’t Let Me Down” depicts the speaker’s relationship with his father through a discussion of several cars—a “shit-brown” Chevy Blazer, a ’64 blue-sparkle Ludwig, and a brand-new green SUV. This move feels inspired by the imagery of an old-fashioned Americana, and it brings a timid brightness to the speaker’s world that feels vividly necessary.

Similarly, the poem “Going Down Slow” centers on our speaker’s relationship with a coworker who shares his desperate frustration with his role in corporate America. The coworkers find joy in the very simple moment of an elevator with a silly automated voice, giggling together “like kids.” That said, the brightness in these kinds of intimate moments is stifled by corporate America: in the poem, the two coworkers immediately come upon a boss that doesn’t even know their names.

As the collection continues, it becomes clear that Gell does offer a way forward and out of the labyrinth we reside in for much of this collection. The natural world brings our speaker a reprieve from the noise of his corporate job. The poem “Wildhoney” has the speaker follow the scent of wildhoney over rolling green hills toward the Pacific, to finally land in a garden surrounded by the lush and gorgeous world. Gell writes his speaker as, “At peace with [his] wildhoney, koi pond, and the Pacific Ocean—the sound of its distinct waves dissolving the pain inside me,” offering us his own personal salve for corporate-sponsored hurt.

Deno Gell gifts readers with Dreaming of North Beach (from Corporate America). This is a vital critique of work life.

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