Daniel Poppick is a poet and novelist. His debut novel is The Copywriter (2026).
He is also the author of the poetry collections Fear of Description (2019), selected for the National Poetry Series, and The Police (2017). His work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Drift, Harper's, BOMB, The New Republic, Chicago Review, and other journals.
At Lit Hub Poppick tagged seven books about work. One title on the author's list:
Kathryn Scanlan, Kick the LatchRead about the other entries on the list.
In this novella about an Iowa woman’s lifelong career training horses, the most haunting characters are the horses themselves: an unpaid shadow workforce at the racetrack, the rodeo, and in stables, empathically and mysteriously buoying the human souls who love them. At times, Kick the Latch seems to suggest that injured racehorses and their exhausted caretakers might share a parallel fate. “Priests came on race days to bless the horses’ legs before they ran,” Scanlan’s shrewd narrator observes, “but there’d be plenty of times it didn’t work.” Everywhere you go, even and especially if they can’t speak, somebody is always working.
--Marshal Zeringue
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