Amid the gritty sensory impact of virtually every essay in BONE OF THE BONE --- and there are three dozen of them, covering the fraught decade of 2013 to 2024 --- author Sarah Smarsh drops in the seemingly innocuous word “flyover.” In reality, it’s a heavily laden social and historical condemnation of systemic political and governmental neglect --- the passing-over of numerous American people and places considered unworthy of election campaign stops, voter education or meaningful government aid.

Most flyover areas in the US are rural, under-serviced, economically depressed and sparsely populated, like the wheat-growing region of Kansas where Smarsh grew up in an unstable and chronically impoverished farming household. Against all odds, she became the first in her family’s remembered history to graduate not only high school, but university as well, and even became a tenured professor before journalism captured her --- mind, body and soul.

"BONE OF THE BONE identifies sharply, compassionately, defiantly and sometimes even hopefully with numerous touchpoints that so many social and political commentators are content to merely 'fly over.'"

Through a succession of grinding agricultural and service industry jobs that barely made ends meet during her young adult years, Smarsh’s keen eye and detailed memory for systemic injustice built up a powerful base of firsthand social and political knowledge. There is defiant intent in her choice of subtitle to BONE OF THE BONE: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class.

In reading any of them, it’s clear beyond any doubt that the most powerful outlet for Smarsh's articulate yet common-sense defiance couldn’t be secure college classrooms with their rows of mostly privileged, passive and sheltered white students, but the precarious career of a freelance reporter and essayist.

Smarsh’s superpower --- at least from the vantage point of a far less complex Canadian system --- is her ability to take in a vast amount of political rhetoric, fluff, distraction, provocation, antipathy, even blatant dishonesty, and cut through it all (literally to the bone), revealing what election trends, promises and issues mean to real working people. Forget the once-idealized middle class; the economic gap in America has become so wide that there’s the 1% and the working class, with the population between them shrinking year after year.

So when you read “Poor Teeth” (2014), it’s not just an overview of dental care gaps across the US; it’s a real and visceral picture of the life-ruining effects of little or no dental care among the poor. Their overall health, job opportunities, mental well-being and lifespans fall apart as their teeth rot from a lack of affordable care and poor nutrition.

In “Blood Brother” (2017), another essay that starkly probes the harsh physical costs of being poor in the world’s wealthiest country, Smarsh describes the grim routine of those forced to sell blood and blood plasma far too often than would be healthy, even for those affluent enough to donate it. One of them was her own college-educated brother, and there are many like him.

“In the Running” (2022), one of Smarsh’s longer essays, unwinds the frustrating and stressful dilemma she faced when encouraged by influential Democratic mentors to run for a Senate seat. Faced with the choice of potentially wielding political power for change, or continuing as an activist writer to chip away at the malaise, neglect and incompetence dragging the American working class further down the socioeconomic ladder, she chose to keep on fighting through words.

This Canadian reader, without having experienced American life at all, is glad Sarah Smarsh made that incredibly difficult choice. BONE OF THE BONE identifies sharply, compassionately, defiantly and sometimes even hopefully with numerous touchpoints that so many social and political commentators are content to merely “fly over.”