Collected here are poems from Peter Oresick's previous books, beginning with The Story of Glass (1977), and to them are added 36 new poems called Under the Carpathians. His work—known for working class and Catholic themes—probes labor and social history, post-World War II America, Eastern European identity, Eastern Rite Catholicism, and Russian icons and fine art and especially Pittsburgh-born pop art icon Andy Warhol.

From the cannery rows of California to the sweatshops of New York, this anthology of poems captures the drama of work and working-class life in industrial America. It speaks of rolling mills, mine shafts, and foundries, and of a people who dig coal, tap blast furnaces, sew shirts, clean fish, and assemble cars. These subjects, though largely absent from literary anthologies and textbooks, are increasingly evident in the work of contemporary poets. Working Classics gathers the best and most representative of these poems, American and Canadian, from 1945 to the present. Included are poems by Antler, Robert Bly, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jim Daniels, Patricia Dobler, Stephen Dunn, Tess Gallagher, Edward Hirsch, David Ignatow, June Jordan, Lawrence Joseph, Philip Levine, Chris Llewellyn, Joyce Carol Oates, Anthony Petrosky, Michael Ryan, Gary Soto, Tom Wayman, James Wright, and many others. The result is a diverse and evocative collection of 169 poems by 74 poets, nearly a third of them women.