I get it sent to my e-mail every so often as an attachment --- a photo of a line of older ladies, all of similar size and shape and in similar dress, smelling the armpits of men. They are deodorant testers. No doubt about it, that's certainly an odd job. Armpit sniffers, shopping cart manufacturers, and urinal puck delivery driver. These are some unusual jobs not commonly found in the want ads of your local newspaper. Mark Jude Poirier knows a bit about odd jobs, and his latest collection of stories, UNSUNG HEROES OF AMERICAN INDUSTRY, is about odd jobs and the workers who work them.

Poirier, whose lunacy has been written and read in books such as NAKED PUEBLO, his first collection of short stories, and GOATS, his first novel, continues with his skewed, dark and often laugh-out-loud (or at least soft chuckle, or at the very least, good smirk) new collection. "Buttons" is about the Badde family and their dynasty. They're known as the Royal Family of Pearl Button Making, but can they survive the tides of popularity and button making machines? Then there's the love story of Billy, the worm farmer, and Dora, the journalist who meets Billy while interviewing him for a story she is writing in "Worms." It doesn't end all that happily. In "Gators" there is the story of Durina, who makes shoes out of the alligators that her mother skins. "Pageantry" takes a look at beauty pageants for girls: "The fourth girl is a mongrel, which is mean to think, Belinda knows, but she's honestly the ugliest thing Belinda has ever seen in eight years of pageantry. She has shapeless brown hair, wide-set Tori Spelling fish eyes, a flat nose, and teeth like a jack-o'-lantern."

Granted, these stories aren't all that deep or philosophical and they probably won't be found in stuffy college literary magazines. They are, however, quite entertaining. They're funny, they're witty, they're filled with a darkness behind the humor. "My family didn't do gators. They didn't fish, either, or work in the cancer factories on the river. My daddy built up a small carnival from nothing but a pair of trained monkeys he had traded with a man for one steel-belted radial tire --- when those tires were first invented."

The book is slim, but the stories are thick with goofball antics and fun wickedness. Poirier doesn't talk down to the button makers and beauty queens, he just tells their tales and lets them live their lives without the thud of judgment or condescending words. It makes the reader wonder about other jobs that are rarely thought about. Poirier tries to remind us, slyly and with humor.

   --- Reviewed by Jonathan Shipley


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