The Grapes of Wrath

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling. A harvest warning, still ripe.

The interchapters about used-car men and pawn shops hit harder than the plot.

Ma Joad held the family with soup and a stare. The strongest spine in fiction.

Tom's I'll be ever'where, wherever they fight for food, he's there. Radicalizing in the good way.

Casy went out to the wilderness and came back with labor rights. A preacher's second album.

Handbills promised eight hundred pickers and gathered five thousand. The math was the cruelty.

Rose of Sharon at the end, feeding a starving man. The book ends at its most human point.

They burned the oranges so prices would hold. Chapter twenty-five ruined my grocery runs.

The turtle crossing the road set the whole book's direction. Slow, stubborn, headed southwest.

Carried out of it: hunger is a policy choice with a math error as alibi.