The heroines of Katherine Karlin’s first collection of short stories, Send Me Work (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern; 159 pages), are on the verge of realizations about their unforgiving communities; that is, they are discovering the forces driving the blue-collar world around them, and, more interestingly, uncovering complex emotional truths about themselves. This is often quite funny. In “Bye-Bye, Larry,” (a Pushcart Prize winner originally published in Zyzzyva’s Spring 2005 issue), the female protagonist, a queer, soon-to-be-laid-off oil worker, muses on the differences between herself and the plant’s female manager: “it occurs to me that if I were taller, smarter, had paid more attention in school, I might have been a power lesbian too.” At other times, the moments are disappointing lessons in the hardships of everyday life.

Throughout these eleven stories, the locations and circumstances change — from print shops to rail yards to oil refineries and more — but the various working worlds are all deftly rendered. In “The Severac Sound,” two talented, young musicians visit the deathbed of their mentor, and a hard-working female oboist has to accept she is not as gifted as her slovenly male competition. In “Muscle Memory,” a coming-of-age story set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Destiny, an aspiring welder, realizes that “taking responsibility was easy… the hard part was all the ruination that lay outside of your responsibility.” The stories are littered with important, small details, like the type of cane used for making a superior oboe reed or the specific vocabulary of an oil worker.

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