Reduction in Force

Reduction in Force

Winner of the 2025 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize

In Reduction in Force, Hugo dos Santos renders the modern layoff as both personal reckoning and cultural mirror. Through poems that move seamlessly between confession, critique, and myth, he exposes the quiet devastations of work, identity, and belonging in late capitalism. Dos Santos’s voice—by turns tender, wry, and incandescent—transforms bureaucratic language into elegy and resistance. This is a book about loss and reinvention, about how the self survives when stripped of its sanctioned purpose.

In a literary moment when so much lyric poetry seems preoccupied with private experience and ready-made epiphany, Hugo Dos Santos’s Reduction in Force is revelatory. It is, yes, an examination of the self, but it performs its review through lenses and landscapes that are rarely utilized in poetry, which is to say the cold and bureaucratized reality of the American corporate world, and the ways that world can affect and pressure the individuals and families who attempt to build their lives under the dominion of those companies. Dos Santos maps the experience of a true believer who must come to terms with the betrayal now inherent in what used to be known as the American dream and work through the humiliation of starting over. He does so in poems that are consistently surprising in content, satisfyingly varied in form and tone, and utterly, winningly, trustworthy to the reader. I haven’t seen anything like this book before, and it heralds the arrival of an original poet, with the promise of more originality and excitement ahead. —Anthony Walton, judge, The May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize.

In a literary moment when so much lyric poetry seems preoccupied with private experience and ready-made epiphany, Hugo dos Santos’s Reduction in Force is revelatory. It is, yes, an examination of the self, but it performs its review through lenses and landscapes that are rarely utilized in poetry, which is to say the cold and bureaucratized reality of the American corporate world, and the ways that world can affect and pressure the individuals and families who attempt to build their lives under the dominion of those companies. Dos Santos maps the experience of a true believer who must come to terms with the betrayal now inherent in what used to be known as the American dream and work through the humiliation of starting over. He does so in poems that are consistently surprising in content, satisfyingly varied in form and tone, and utterly, winningly, trustworthy to the reader. I haven’t seen anything like this book before, and it heralds the arrival of an original poet, with the promise of more originality and excitement ahead. —Anthony Walton, Judge May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize 2025 and author

Hugo dos Santos writes from the ruins of certainty. In Reduction in Force, the self unbuilds itself—absent a job, absent a title, absent the bricks that once made up the house of who we used to be. These poems move through the wreckage with a Pessoa-like devotion to the interior life, asking: where were we while our undoing was happening? What do we cause, and what do we suffer?

The oneiric world offers no refuge. Dreams are crowded train stations and missed flights, the constant immigrant feeling of never arriving, only ever being traveler, goer, seeking an approximation of home. With children as witnesses and morning coffee as ritual, dos Santos draws faint lines between accountability and control, cataloging everything he can remember to include. The lists are longer than expected. This is poetry that refuses easy answers, that sits with stubborn defeat, and brief streaks of self-belief in equal measure.

Reduction in Force proves that sometimes the only honest response to collapse is to watch it closely, to document what remains, and to keep the pencil moving. —Marwa Helal, author of Invasive species

Like Susan Briante’s The Market Wonders and Candace Williams’ I Am the Most Dangerous Thing, Hugo dos Santos’ Reduction of Force boldly confronts the precarity of life under late stage capitalism, how we survive it while still retaining our humanity, how we find ways to make beauty despite not knowing where that next paycheck is coming from. Penned with sobering clarity and vulnerability, this is a book for and about the 99 percent. On its pages you will find a writer working hard to interrogate what it means to work hard. —Vincent Toro, author of Hivestruck

Reduction in Force, the new book by Hugo dos Santos, is more than a poetry collection. The poems in this book and the author’s remarkable and unique voice forced me to experience each minute the narrator sits at the desk in his basement, every one of his breaths filled with anxiety, each rejection and silence he is met with, leaving me unsure if anybody could escape the world we are living through unscathed. We read poetry that makes our heart hurt. We read poetry that lets our imaginations wander into unexpected places. This book made my physical body feel every detail and every tick tock of the clock. This book is an absolutely visceral experience that captures a moment in a person’s life, in a family’s dynamic and captures what it’s like to try and survive in 2025 when costs are too high and jobs are too few and the world goes on burning all around us. Reduction in Force is nothing short of stunning. —Chiwan Choi, author of Sky Songs and The Yellow House

Hugo dos Santos’ debut poetry collection, Reduction in Force, presents readers with the ultimate immigrant nightmare: unemployment. Drawing from his Luso-American heritage—both a point of pride and a toxic metric for immigrant striving—Dos Santos writes from the desk and beyond it, from the liminal space between work and worth.

Through the journey of an unemployed father and husband, these poems interrogate how capitalism reduces us to nothing unless we labor, tracing the loss of identity as he “search[es] for the lost trail of who [he] used to be.” In this landscape of layoffs and longing, Dos Santos crafts “order from chaos”, weaving mythology, dreamwork, and personal narrative into a meditation on immigrant masculinity, the meaning of success, and what is at stake when our “children see [us] contributing to/ the world as they learn about its apathy, ” by watching how we struggle to remain in it.

Reduction in Force is, as the kids say, too real – a fast-moving, visceral portrait of separation, survival, and saudade, and how the three remain inextricably tethered. —Marina Carreira, poet, educator, and author of Dead Things and Where to Put Them

“Change is the longest word I know,” says the earnest narrator of these poems when his job disappears. He becomes a 21^st Century Sisyphus, pushing his LinkedIn-approved CV and AI-enhanced cover letter up countless virtual mountains where instead of rolling backwards, they disappear into the cloud. He presses “Submit! Submit!” pressing on, hoping the universe will offer him a job so once again he can smile at his children. But rather than despair, he discovers “another wing in the house of me.” Dos Santos writes with grace and beauty, reminding himself, and us, “the cure for life is more life.” —Peter E. Murphy, author of You Too Were Once on Fire