Birds and Factories

This book collects over a hundred poems written by American blue-collar poet Sue Doro between the 1960s and 1990s, during which she worked as an operator, mother, daughter, and active participant in the women's trade movement. The title is taken from her first self-published poetry collection, Birds and Factories, released in 1983.

We are deeply honored to have received Sue Doro's encouragement and support to publish the Chinese translation by Wu Ji. During the period of coordinating the publication, her health fluctuated, and she moved from Oakland, California, to Long Island on the East Coast to be closer to her daughter and live out her later years. However, her emails remained full of passion, simultaneously inquiring about the book's progress and keeping up with current political realities. In these difficult times, the connection we established with her through this publication has given us endless encouragement.

In the process of publishing this book, we not only included the translated poems but also incorporated visual and textual materials from her three poetry collections, beyond just the poems themselves. This includes the covers, illustrations, prefaces, author biographies, and acknowledgements from 1983, 1986, and 1992, as well as the Blue Jeans Pocket Writers' Handbook, which is still in use today and specifically encourages women technical workers to write. Therefore, the Chinese edition of Birds and Factories is not just a collection of Sue Doro's works spanning over forty years, but also a precious record witnessing and archiving a journey of workers' writing publication that transcends time and real-world contexts.