A job application is supposed to be about the least emotional writing there is: a stiff greeting, a few qualifications, a hopeful sign-off. Bob Perelman's "A Job" borrows that shape and drains it of everything except strangeness. In three lines and two repeated words, the speaker announces, "I have taken the veil, / and am looking for grief." The poem is about what happens when sorrow is treated as work, and when the language of business is asked to carry a feeling it was never built for.
Take the phrases one at a time. "Dear sirs" is the voice of institutional correspondence: plural, faceless, a committee rather than a person. "Dear" promises warmth, but "sirs" cancels it, so the greeting is affectionate and cold at once. Then comes "I have taken the veil," the idiom for becoming a nun, a vocation usually imagined as lifelong and deeply serious. Dropped into a letter, it sounds like a line on a CV, a previous position. A veil also hides a face and is worn at funerals, so grief is already approaching before the third line names it. And "looking for grief" is wonderfully off. People look for work, and they look for trouble, but nobody looks for grief; it arrives uninvited. The verb turns sorrow into a vacancy that can be applied for. The title pushes the same way. "A Job" is what the speaker wants, but it is hard not to hear Job, the biblical figure famous for suffering. The poem invites that echo without stating it.
The construction is deliberately plain. The letter has no rhyme and no decoration. The last two lines are each six syllables, with a matching beat: "I have TAKen the VEIL," "and am LOOKing for GRIEF." That evenness makes the speaker sound calm and rehearsed, a person reciting a prepared statement. The oddness is carried entirely by the content, delivered in a perfectly straight face.
Then the form breaks. After a gap, the poem gives us "tears / tears," two lowercase words with no punctuation and no grammar. Where a letter would close with "Yours faithfully," the poem closes with the thing the applicant was looking for. There is a quiet piece of sound design here too: "tears" nearly rhymes with the opening word "Dear," so the first and last words of the poem chime, as if the feeling had been waiting all along to catch up with the greeting. "Sirs" and "tears" also share a closing z-sound, which ties the polite surface to the emotion beneath it.
The repeated word is also a small trap. "Tears" is spelled the same whether it means weeping or ripping. Read aloud, the first might be drops from the eyes and the second a tear in cloth, perhaps in the very veil the speaker has just mentioned. That is an inference, since the poem never says so, but the doubled word and the stacked lines invite it. The repetition can also be heard as a demonstration, the applicant showing off the skill on request. We cannot tell whether the sorrow is real or performed, and that uncertainty is the point. The poem refuses to say whether grief can be sincere once it has been written up as a qualification.
What makes it significant is how much collision it fits into so little space. Religious renunciation, bureaucratic politeness and raw emotion share a page, and none of them wins. Perelman is generally grouped with the Language poets, and the poem suits that association. It treats ready-made phrases, a business salutation, an idiom about nuns, a cliché about tears, as material to be rearranged, and lets the friction between them do the thinking. A reader may laugh at the first line and feel uneasy by the last.
For a student, "A Job" shows how much a poem can do by borrowing a form we already know and then letting that form fail. The letter cannot contain what it has asked for, and what spills out is just two words, repeated.