1919, Eve L. Ewing

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language: English
country: USA
year: 2019
form: poetry
dates read: 8.1.23

Eve L. Ewing’s 1919 is a collection of poetry built around the history of the 1919 Chicago race riot, and in particular the Chicago Commission on Race Relations’s 1922 report on the riot, The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot. it’s divided into three sections: Before, which explores the history of the Great Migration and Black life in Chicago before July 1919; What Happened, which moves through the riot itself, from the drowning of Eugene Williams on 27 July to the rain on 30 July that heralded the end of the riot; and After, which traces the legacy of the riot on Black life in Chicago.

it came to my attention through a conference presentation (theme of the day) that read a few of the poems as speculative poetry, in particular the final poem the collection, “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store”. the whole project of the collection sounded interesting, so I requested it from the library.

it’s kaleidoscopic, appropriately for a collection that is about communal history. the collection moves between speakers and forms — a train that carried Black migrants north (“My children. My precious ones. / I can never take you home. You have none. / And so you go, out into the wind.”); a teacher now working at a meat-packing plant; pseudofolklore about the Great Fire (“The Great Fire can only move at right angles.”); a jump-rope rhyme about Williams’s death; James Crawford, a Black man who was after shooting at police who refused to arrest the person/people responsible for Williams’s death; a child in the far future who only knows cars from history books (“well what would you do if you had more than four friends?”); a blackout poem built on an email Ewing received from her apartment building management on the day of the Jason Van Dyke verdict.

it doesn’t pull any punches (thus “dark” and “sad”), but it also clings to the possibility that things can be different: that we can make a future where cars are century-old history, where borders are erased, where Emmett Till — who I read here as (partly) a metonym for Black boys in general — can simply go about his grocery shopping.

                    how are things going for you

oh he sighed and put the candy on the belt
it goes, it goes.

really good. absolutely 3/3 with books so far this year.

moods: dark, hopeful, reflective, sad


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