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Book

1919

Call Number

  • 811 E953.1 (POW)

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Publication Information

Chicago, Illinois : Haymarket Books, 2019.

Physical Description

74 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Uniform Title

Poems. Selections

Summary

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the "Red Summer" of violence across the nation's cities, is an event that has shaped the last century but is widely unknown. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event--which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries--through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

Contents

  • Exodus 1
  • The train speaks
  • In November
  • At the summit
  • Coming from the stock yards
  • Keeping house
  • Anatomy: a treatise on the manifest differences of the negro
  • True stories about The Great Fire
  • Exodus 5
  • Or does it explode
  • Jump / rope
  • The pearl diver
  • James Crawford speaks
  • City in a garden
  • the street-car speaks
  • Sightseers
  • This is a map
  • There is no poem for this
  • Barricade
  • Upon seeing a picture of a car in a school book
  • Haibun for July 30
  • Exodus 10
  • It wouldn't take much
  • Countless schemes
  • April 5, 1968
  • July, July!
  • The day of undoing
  • I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store.

Subjects

Genres

Poetry.