HOMAGE TO A WORD

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Review of Dave Boles's Homage to a Word

Dave Boles's Homage to a Word constructs a devastating political argument through the collision of two words: "revolution" and "deregulation." The poem traces a forty-year arc of economic devastation, positioning deregulation not as policy but as a chanted mantra—a five-syllable incantation that seduced both political parties into dismantling the financial protections that once sustained ordinary Americans. By returning to "revolution" at the poem's close, Boles suggests that history moves in cycles, that the language of resistance resurfaces when systems fail completely.

The work's power lies in its chant-like repetition and escalating catalog of loss: no pensions, no jobs, no healthcare, no food, no education. This accumulation mirrors the relentless spread of deregulation itself, building emotional force through parallelism and stark enumeration. Boles forgoes ambiguity in favor of direct indictment, naming bankers, politicians, and media as complicit actors in a coordinated assault on the working class. The poem's protest stance is uncompromising—there is no neutral ground here, only victims and perpetrators.

What emerges is a work of urgent conviction: a polemic dressed in verse, structured to move and provoke rather than to complicate or qualify. Whether one accepts its political diagnosis entirely, the poem's formal choices—its repetition, its escalating despair, its cyclical return to revolution—give its argument a memorable, almost liturgical weight. It is a poem that demands to be heard aloud, chanted like the very mantra it critiques.