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1919
Poetic reflections on race, class, violence, segregation, and the hidden histories that shape our divided urban landscapes.
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.
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.
2 pages, Audiobook
First published June 4, 2019
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About the author
Eve L. Ewing
99 books1,205 followersDr. Eve Louise Ewing is a writer and a sociologist of education from Chicago. Ewing is a prolific writer across multiple genres. Her 2018 book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism & School Closings on Chicago's South Side explores the relationship between the closing of public schools and the structural history of race and racism in Chicago's Bronzeville community.
Ewing's first collection of poetry, essays, and visual art, Electric Arches, was published by Haymarket Books in 2017. Her second collection, 1919, tells the story of the race riot that rocked Chicago in the summer of that year. Her first book for elementary readers, Maya and the Robot, is forthcoming in 2020 from Kokila, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Her work has been published in many venues, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, and the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, curated by Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States. With Nate Marshall, she co-wrote the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, produced by Manual Cinema and commissioned by the Poetry Foundation. She also currently writes the Champions series for Marvel Comics and previously wrote the acclaimed Ironheart series, as well as other projects.
Ewing's first collection of poetry, essays, and visual art, Electric Arches, was published by Haymarket Books in 2017. Her second collection, 1919, tells the story of the race riot that rocked Chicago in the summer of that year. Her first book for elementary readers, Maya and the Robot, is forthcoming in 2020 from Kokila, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Her work has been published in many venues, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, and the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, curated by Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States. With Nate Marshall, she co-wrote the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, produced by Manual Cinema and commissioned by the Poetry Foundation. She also currently writes the Champions series for Marvel Comics and previously wrote the acclaimed Ironheart series, as well as other projects.
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March 11, 2020
“If there was racial harmony and equality in the year 2019, maybe we wouldn’t need to talk about the race riots of 1919”—Peter Cole
City in a Garden
(after Carl Sandburg)
The Negro crowd from Twenty-ninth Street got into action, and white men who came in contact with it were beaten. . . Farther to the west, as darkness came on, white gangsters became active. Negroes in white districts suffered severely at their hands. From 9:00 p.m. until 3:00 a.m. twenty-seven Negroes were beaten, seven were stabbed, and four were shot. (5)
o my ugly homestead,
blood-sodden prairie.
urbs in horto. meaning:
if it grows, it once came from dirt
o my love, why do you till the ground with iron?
o my miracle, why do you fire in the dark?
you, thief of dusk, you, captain of my sorrows. you, avarice.
your ground is greedy for our children, and you take them as you please.
the babies come from you, the train car orators, and the beloved hustlers.
they die. and then you send forth more. you, who makes a place
in a middle land. you, ruthless. you, seed ground.
you bear the best of us and the worst in equal measure.
o my garden, which am I?
1919, by urban sociologist and writer Eve Ewing is a collection of poems about the 1919 Chicago Race riots, where many people died, much property damage was done and much damage was also done to the city’s perception of itself as welcoming and warm, one central destination, after all, of The Great Migration. It is not as well-known a moment in history as The Chicago Fire or The Haymarket Riot of 1886, but Ewing argues, through her poems, that they did much to shape the next century of racial relations in this city.
In researching her book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, Ewing came across a post-riot report, The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922) and decided some quotations from the book just begged her to write poems back to them. Why poems? Sometimes poems can get at emotional truths in ways sociology just may not be able to do, let’s say. Get at the lived experience of those days from the perspective of people, which the disciplines of History and Sociology just cannot adequately do.
Ewing tries different forms—haibun, erasures, some have a kind of Biblical cast. There’s a poem about Emmett Till. The poems are introduced by quotations from The Negro in Chicago, and accompanied by brief by historical framing paragraphs and photographs. From Chicago’s own Haymarket Press.
or does it explode
man it was so hot
how hot was it
it was so hot
you could cook an egg
on that big forehead of yours
you a lie
man i tell you it was so hot
how hot
it was so hot
i dropped a tomato in the lake
and made campbell’s soup
nuh uh
it was so hot
the sun tried to get in the swimming pool
and everybody else had to get out
boy that’s hot
who you tellin
that day was so hot
how hot
it was so hot
our dreams laid out on the sidewalk
and said ‘never mind, we good’
City in a Garden
(after Carl Sandburg)
The Negro crowd from Twenty-ninth Street got into action, and white men who came in contact with it were beaten. . . Farther to the west, as darkness came on, white gangsters became active. Negroes in white districts suffered severely at their hands. From 9:00 p.m. until 3:00 a.m. twenty-seven Negroes were beaten, seven were stabbed, and four were shot. (5)
o my ugly homestead,
blood-sodden prairie.
urbs in horto. meaning:
if it grows, it once came from dirt
o my love, why do you till the ground with iron?
o my miracle, why do you fire in the dark?
you, thief of dusk, you, captain of my sorrows. you, avarice.
your ground is greedy for our children, and you take them as you please.
the babies come from you, the train car orators, and the beloved hustlers.
they die. and then you send forth more. you, who makes a place
in a middle land. you, ruthless. you, seed ground.
you bear the best of us and the worst in equal measure.
o my garden, which am I?
1919, by urban sociologist and writer Eve Ewing is a collection of poems about the 1919 Chicago Race riots, where many people died, much property damage was done and much damage was also done to the city’s perception of itself as welcoming and warm, one central destination, after all, of The Great Migration. It is not as well-known a moment in history as The Chicago Fire or The Haymarket Riot of 1886, but Ewing argues, through her poems, that they did much to shape the next century of racial relations in this city.
In researching her book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, Ewing came across a post-riot report, The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922) and decided some quotations from the book just begged her to write poems back to them. Why poems? Sometimes poems can get at emotional truths in ways sociology just may not be able to do, let’s say. Get at the lived experience of those days from the perspective of people, which the disciplines of History and Sociology just cannot adequately do.
Ewing tries different forms—haibun, erasures, some have a kind of Biblical cast. There’s a poem about Emmett Till. The poems are introduced by quotations from The Negro in Chicago, and accompanied by brief by historical framing paragraphs and photographs. From Chicago’s own Haymarket Press.
or does it explode
man it was so hot
how hot was it
it was so hot
you could cook an egg
on that big forehead of yours
you a lie
man i tell you it was so hot
how hot
it was so hot
i dropped a tomato in the lake
and made campbell’s soup
nuh uh
it was so hot
the sun tried to get in the swimming pool
and everybody else had to get out
boy that’s hot
who you tellin
that day was so hot
how hot
it was so hot
our dreams laid out on the sidewalk
and said ‘never mind, we good’
February 20, 2023
A history lesson in the form of poetry. 1919 is a brief poetry collection based on historical accounts of the Chicago race riots of the eponymous year 1919. It's a cool approach and overall I found the poems to be interesting and moving. Thank you to Libro.FM for providing a free audio copy for Black History Month!
Read
July 23, 2019A poem cycle about the Chicago race riots of 1919. An absolute standout, a tapestry of poetry, nonfiction, even with the occasional speculative element. A very strong second collection after a very strong first collection (Electric Arches); I also just got her academic nonfiction book on racism in Chicago schools from the library and looking forward to reading that too. And I need to get her comic book writing.
I feel like there is a very characteristic style of how to write about marginalization in nongenre poetry (that seems to cut across different marginalizations), which sometimes frustrates me, and this book was *not* like that.
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library
Also on Bogi Reads the World: http://www.bogireadstheworld.com/smal...
I feel like there is a very characteristic style of how to write about marginalization in nongenre poetry (that seems to cut across different marginalizations), which sometimes frustrates me, and this book was *not* like that.
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library
Also on Bogi Reads the World: http://www.bogireadstheworld.com/smal...
November 19, 2020
This powerful book published in 2019 by Haymarket Books focuses on a deadly race riot that happened in Chicago exactly one century prior, exploring its historical and cultural contexts going back to the Great Migration of African Americans from the American South to the Midwest around the turn of the century. A variety of poetic forms are used: jump-rope chants, a tanka sequence, a haibun, a blackout poem, a poem in the form of two thin intertwining columns of text.
Though anchored in historical truth, these poems make full use of the imagination, venturing into the excitingly dynamic terrain of speculative poetry. One poem anthropomorphizes the Great Fire of Chicago (“The Great Fire can only move at right angles. / The Great Fire goes from block to block at night / and kisses stray cats in the moonlight / and the cats catch the Holy Ghost”). Another poem imagines a future in which all motor vehicles have been phased out (as a response to the use of cars to terrorize Black neighborhoods during the 1919 riot). One breathtaking prose poem, “The Day of Undoing,” crafts a haunting myth about children working together as an uncannily single-minded collective to transcend the restrictive conventions established by their elders.
The poems are interspersed with evocative black-and-white photographs from the time period, including several by a photojournalist I previously knew little about, Jun Fujita. Upon looking up Fujita, I learned he was not only a pathbreaking photojournalist but also a highly respected pioneering English-language tanka poet who was even published in Poetry magazine. At a time when Asians could not become naturalized American citizens, Congress granted him honorary citizenship in recognition of his contributions to society.
Though anchored in historical truth, these poems make full use of the imagination, venturing into the excitingly dynamic terrain of speculative poetry. One poem anthropomorphizes the Great Fire of Chicago (“The Great Fire can only move at right angles. / The Great Fire goes from block to block at night / and kisses stray cats in the moonlight / and the cats catch the Holy Ghost”). Another poem imagines a future in which all motor vehicles have been phased out (as a response to the use of cars to terrorize Black neighborhoods during the 1919 riot). One breathtaking prose poem, “The Day of Undoing,” crafts a haunting myth about children working together as an uncannily single-minded collective to transcend the restrictive conventions established by their elders.
The poems are interspersed with evocative black-and-white photographs from the time period, including several by a photojournalist I previously knew little about, Jun Fujita. Upon looking up Fujita, I learned he was not only a pathbreaking photojournalist but also a highly respected pioneering English-language tanka poet who was even published in Poetry magazine. At a time when Asians could not become naturalized American citizens, Congress granted him honorary citizenship in recognition of his contributions to society.
May 8, 2020
I absolutely love poetry collections that deeply focus around one historical event or close theme, and this book is no different. Eve L. Ewing explores the Chicago race riot of 1919 through poetry, with poems tracing the lead-up, the riot, and it's effects. With quotes from the 1922 study "The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot" at the start of each poem and gorgeous photos of Black Chicagoans interspersed throughout the collection, 1919 reads like a history book in the best way. I was unfamiliar with the 1919 riot before which only increased my appreciation for the book. I love how much Ewing loves Chicago and Black people - the deep humanity and love emanates off the page.
January 12, 2021
In 1919, race riots roared through Chicago killing 23 blacks and 5 whites, injuring 537, and leaving 1,000 homeless. 5,000 to 6,000 National Guard were called to restore order. 17-year-old Eugene Williams was swimming in Lake Michigan when he was killed by thrown rocks after drifting toward a “white area” beach. After a police officer refused to arrest the person deemed responsible, unrest ensued. Unfortunately most of the violence was committed against blacks by roving white youth “athletic clubs.” In the months and weeks leading up the riots, there had been a continuing bombing campaign against blacks who were trying to move out of the city’s segregated neighborhoods and those who provided realty or mortgage services for them. Using excerpts of a 1922 report entitled, “The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race relations and a Race Riot”, Ms. Ewing created a memorable collection of poems addressing past and current issues of race and the riots. I was unfamiliar and saddened to learn of this tragic chapter in our history. Initially the poetry did not resonate with me, but the poems grew on me. I especially liked “or does it explode”, “this is a map”, “there is no poem for this”, “Barricade”, “upon seeing a pictures of a car in a school book”, and “The Day of Undoing.” The preface to “Exodus 10" quoting from a 1920 issue of the “Property Owner’s Journal” was very disturbing regarding blacks as neighbors. I loved the cover of the book. It was remarkable to see all the men (and many boys and women) wearing hats as was the fashion then in the 1919 and 1922 black and white photographs. 3.75 stars. I recommend.
March 15, 2021
Poetry as a counterplay to The Negro in Chicago A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot, a report written by six Black men and six white men about the 1919 race riot—because sometimes a poem is the only way to express grief, and even there are times that a silence is much better than saying anything.
My favorite pieces were:
The Train Speaks
or does it explode
sightseers.
And the ending was absolutely brutal.
My favorite pieces were:
The Train Speaks
or does it explode
sightseers.
And the ending was absolutely brutal.
June 13, 2021
Listened to the audiobook on Scribd!
1919 was a good Scribd find for a long day of both reading books and wanting to educate myself on hardly discussed topics through history. The Chicago race riots of 1919 are told in a mixture of poetry and historical research, both eye-opening and raw. I really enjoyed Eve's writing and would read more publications by her in the future.
1919 was a good Scribd find for a long day of both reading books and wanting to educate myself on hardly discussed topics through history. The Chicago race riots of 1919 are told in a mixture of poetry and historical research, both eye-opening and raw. I really enjoyed Eve's writing and would read more publications by her in the future.
December 10, 2019
Extraordinary.
August 27, 2025
I'm not generally a poetry fan, but I still try from time to time, usually when the poetry intersects with other interests of mine. In this case, it's US history of racial injustice, and more particularly, the 1919 Chicago "race riots". So when I saw this available from Libby, and it was only an hour long on audio, I swooped it up.
I know that "race riot" is the common term used to refer to these events (Springfield 1908, Atlanta in 1909, Ocoee in 1920, Tulsa in 1921, Rosewood in 1923... just to name a very few of the more well known ones), but I hate that term. It always seems to me to be laying the blame for the events on the Black, Indigenous, or whatever variety of non-white people were involved. When whiteness is considered the norm, therefore calling something a "race riot" makes it out like people who are of a non-white "race" are therefore responsible for the riot.
But in all five of the ones I mentioned, the violence was incited by white people. White mobs attacked Black people, communities, businesses, homes. It doesn't really matter what it was that set the white mob off - maybe a Black person tried to vote, or committed a petty crime, or was outside of where white people deemed they were "allowed" to be, or maybe they weren't sufficiently deferential, or maybe they were just existing too visibly. And those are the events with the larger death counts - let's not forget about the smaller-scale lynchings that were prevalent at the time. So popular they'd make it a community event picnic and sell souvenirs, postcards depicting strung-up, mutilated bodies, cut off pieces of the victims... Bring the kids! Fun for the whole KKKlan.
Some of the "branding" has been adjusted as awareness has been brought to light about the true history and causes of these events. Tulsa is now generally referred to as a massacre, with the perpetrator's being the white mob, and the victims being the Black community. Which is probably why the right is all up in arms about "DEI" and "Woke agendas" in schools having the audacity to teach about the actual history of race relations in the US, and not just their lies and propaganda.
In Chicago, the trigger was a young Black boy swimming, and either drifting or swimming into the "whites only" section, leading the white people to throw rocks and stones at the boy, causing him to drown. And then no arrests, no consequences, no repercussions at all for the white people who caused the death of a child because he happened to drift into "their" section of water. This led to weeks of chaos, dozens of deaths, and thousands of displaced Black people, all told.
But I can't really say that I blame them. I would rampage too if my community was constantly being attacked with impunity, and Black lives were deemed as so little in worth that police wouldn't even bother arresting the people who directly caused a CHILD TO DROWN, simply for crossing an invisible, arbitrary line. Rage, riot, rampage.
Anyway - I digress. Let's get back to this book. This was a collection of poetry that was inspired by, and relevant to, the Black experience, the violence of this moment, and a report that was written afterward about it. I will freely admit that poetry is often lost on me, but this was fairly direct and "easy" to follow, not overly symbolic or metaphorical, and so it worked well for me. I think listening to it helped quite a bit too, because READING poetry well is definitely a skill I do not possess.
These were short, and quite a lot of them, and I listened to the whole collection over half of a 3 mile walk. Quite nice, despite the subject matter, which was heartbreaking.
There was one poem that has stuck with me, portraying the daily routine of a woman who would return home after a long, long workday to find her little son sleeping with her handkerchief in the doorway, and the imagery and repetitiveness just got to me, you know? Like... how can people NOT see the humanity of others simply because of the color of their skin? How can you look at a little boy, grasping onto this item of his mother that is the only thing he has of her while she's working to support him, sleeping in the doorway waiting for her and NOT be touched and a little heartbroken and sad for the lack of options they had available to them?
I am rarely a poetry person... but sometimes, occasionally, they speak to me. And this collection did. Highly recommend.
I know that "race riot" is the common term used to refer to these events (Springfield 1908, Atlanta in 1909, Ocoee in 1920, Tulsa in 1921, Rosewood in 1923... just to name a very few of the more well known ones), but I hate that term. It always seems to me to be laying the blame for the events on the Black, Indigenous, or whatever variety of non-white people were involved. When whiteness is considered the norm, therefore calling something a "race riot" makes it out like people who are of a non-white "race" are therefore responsible for the riot.
But in all five of the ones I mentioned, the violence was incited by white people. White mobs attacked Black people, communities, businesses, homes. It doesn't really matter what it was that set the white mob off - maybe a Black person tried to vote, or committed a petty crime, or was outside of where white people deemed they were "allowed" to be, or maybe they weren't sufficiently deferential, or maybe they were just existing too visibly. And those are the events with the larger death counts - let's not forget about the smaller-scale lynchings that were prevalent at the time. So popular they'd make it a community event picnic and sell souvenirs, postcards depicting strung-up, mutilated bodies, cut off pieces of the victims... Bring the kids! Fun for the whole KKKlan.
Some of the "branding" has been adjusted as awareness has been brought to light about the true history and causes of these events. Tulsa is now generally referred to as a massacre, with the perpetrator's being the white mob, and the victims being the Black community. Which is probably why the right is all up in arms about "DEI" and "Woke agendas" in schools having the audacity to teach about the actual history of race relations in the US, and not just their lies and propaganda.
In Chicago, the trigger was a young Black boy swimming, and either drifting or swimming into the "whites only" section, leading the white people to throw rocks and stones at the boy, causing him to drown. And then no arrests, no consequences, no repercussions at all for the white people who caused the death of a child because he happened to drift into "their" section of water. This led to weeks of chaos, dozens of deaths, and thousands of displaced Black people, all told.
But I can't really say that I blame them. I would rampage too if my community was constantly being attacked with impunity, and Black lives were deemed as so little in worth that police wouldn't even bother arresting the people who directly caused a CHILD TO DROWN, simply for crossing an invisible, arbitrary line. Rage, riot, rampage.
Anyway - I digress. Let's get back to this book. This was a collection of poetry that was inspired by, and relevant to, the Black experience, the violence of this moment, and a report that was written afterward about it. I will freely admit that poetry is often lost on me, but this was fairly direct and "easy" to follow, not overly symbolic or metaphorical, and so it worked well for me. I think listening to it helped quite a bit too, because READING poetry well is definitely a skill I do not possess.
These were short, and quite a lot of them, and I listened to the whole collection over half of a 3 mile walk. Quite nice, despite the subject matter, which was heartbreaking.
There was one poem that has stuck with me, portraying the daily routine of a woman who would return home after a long, long workday to find her little son sleeping with her handkerchief in the doorway, and the imagery and repetitiveness just got to me, you know? Like... how can people NOT see the humanity of others simply because of the color of their skin? How can you look at a little boy, grasping onto this item of his mother that is the only thing he has of her while she's working to support him, sleeping in the doorway waiting for her and NOT be touched and a little heartbroken and sad for the lack of options they had available to them?
I am rarely a poetry person... but sometimes, occasionally, they speak to me. And this collection did. Highly recommend.
October 22, 2020
An exploration of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 (part of the "Red Summer" in the US) via haunting poetry.
June 14, 2019
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of seeing Eve Ewing read from this collection at a bookstore in Chicago. The first poem she read was called "Jump/Rope," and when the poem ended, you could practically feel the air collectively whoosh out of every body in the room. The rest of the collection is just as visceral, from the first to the last moment (my favorite of all, "I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store"). This book is both a piece of art and a history lesson, a book that makes Chicago look different in today's light and a book that forces tears from you on every page. It is brutal and beautiful and difficult, and it's something every Chicagoan, and really every American should read.
October 28, 2024
Wow, dang, this book is amazing. I knew before I was halfway finished that I'd be teaching this book next semester and probably for many many semesters to come.
February 26, 2025
part of an embarrassing book swap where I received this book of poems on chicago history and specifically the race riots of 1919 written by a local chicagoan author and in return I gave The Love Hypothesis.
overall beautiful, emotional poetry and encouraged me to get more into chicago history as well as poetry. pls drop chicago history or poetry recs for me asap!
overall beautiful, emotional poetry and encouraged me to get more into chicago history as well as poetry. pls drop chicago history or poetry recs for me asap!
October 28, 2025
Innovative. Heartbreaking. This is art.
Read
July 27, 2019I've been waiting to read this since I first heard of it last year or earlier this year. My first read of it, today, is the 100 year anniversary of Eugene William's death and the start of the worst riots of the 1919 "Red Summer."
The excerpts, while quaintly written, are not unfamiliar to what you might read today in any media. The poems are beautiful. Highly recommended.
The excerpts, while quaintly written, are not unfamiliar to what you might read today in any media. The poems are beautiful. Highly recommended.
June 14, 2021
Good Information Piece
November 29, 2019
'to all those who speak of rivers; to all those who made safe passage and to all those lost in the waters'.
Eve L. Ewing through her poems in 1919, seeks to incite a passion in us to talk about the race riots in Chicago, July 1919.
These poems chronicle the hardships, sacrifices, endurance, perseverance, trauma, legacies, and hope of all who came before and laboured for a better tomorrow.
Through her research and newspaper articles from around that time, she paints a clear picture of their Exodus from a place of cruelty, harsh, unjust, and inhumane existence to a place of 'acceptance'; where they would finally be able to establish themselves, find work, fair pay, a place to prosper and flourish. What they found however, was much different.
I found that the use of the actual past events and the written word of these events made these poems all the more affecting and personal.
Favourites were: The Great Fire & this is a map.
Favourite verses:
...X is how they signed their names when they first came to me. To each I said no, you have a name, and I wrote with them, until they wrote alone...
...For upon them the darkness was as burnt sugar: pleasing to the skin, and sweet upon the lips...
Eve L. Ewing through her poems in 1919, seeks to incite a passion in us to talk about the race riots in Chicago, July 1919.
These poems chronicle the hardships, sacrifices, endurance, perseverance, trauma, legacies, and hope of all who came before and laboured for a better tomorrow.
Through her research and newspaper articles from around that time, she paints a clear picture of their Exodus from a place of cruelty, harsh, unjust, and inhumane existence to a place of 'acceptance'; where they would finally be able to establish themselves, find work, fair pay, a place to prosper and flourish. What they found however, was much different.
I found that the use of the actual past events and the written word of these events made these poems all the more affecting and personal.
Favourites were: The Great Fire & this is a map.
Favourite verses:
...X is how they signed their names when they first came to me. To each I said no, you have a name, and I wrote with them, until they wrote alone...
...For upon them the darkness was as burnt sugar: pleasing to the skin, and sweet upon the lips...
August 18, 2020
Whew. I shouldn't have devoured this one hour audiobook in the middle of the work day. It is breathtaking. Truly. It is timely and important and beautiful and it broke my heart. I feel heavier now that i've read it--more firmly grounded in the truths of my people.
There are two poems in particular that stood out to me (read: made me cry)-- jump/rope and sightseers.
There are two poems in particular that stood out to me (read: made me cry)-- jump/rope and sightseers.
June 24, 2019
Haunting.
Restrained.
Powerful.
Restrained.
Powerful.
June 20, 2019
"A precision that is both beautiful and deeply uncomfortable..."
The above originated in an NPR review of Electric Arches, but the sentiment perfectly encapsulates the experience of 1919.
The creative vision that sparked this work is alone worthy of exclamation: craft verse in conversation with passages from a 1922 report (The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot) to shine a light on a criminally unknown event and what resonance it still holds today. The forms of poetry vary, but one element held in common is the illumination of truth, as well as what the reader/listener might do with this newfound understanding.
The structure is eminently accessible; concise entries and overall brevity might entice casual curiosity. However, once phrases are taken in, the impact is inescapable. I might cite specific poems that moved me to break away for contemplation (the candidates would be many), but if I were to cite only one it would have to be "there is no poem for this" wherein the poet simply quotes a particularly heinous encounter and allows it sit with no additional comment. That restraint speaks volumes.
When a heavily redacted memo pleading for tempered response, one that is revealed to have been received in anticipation of verdict for a racially charged trial in late 2018, is juxtaposed with the events of the Red Summer race riots, the option of looking away is untenable.
This is an elegant, powerful work that is destined to prompt both conversation and, one can only hope, change.
The above originated in an NPR review of Electric Arches, but the sentiment perfectly encapsulates the experience of 1919.
The creative vision that sparked this work is alone worthy of exclamation: craft verse in conversation with passages from a 1922 report (The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot) to shine a light on a criminally unknown event and what resonance it still holds today. The forms of poetry vary, but one element held in common is the illumination of truth, as well as what the reader/listener might do with this newfound understanding.
The structure is eminently accessible; concise entries and overall brevity might entice casual curiosity. However, once phrases are taken in, the impact is inescapable. I might cite specific poems that moved me to break away for contemplation (the candidates would be many), but if I were to cite only one it would have to be "there is no poem for this" wherein the poet simply quotes a particularly heinous encounter and allows it sit with no additional comment. That restraint speaks volumes.
When a heavily redacted memo pleading for tempered response, one that is revealed to have been received in anticipation of verdict for a racially charged trial in late 2018, is juxtaposed with the events of the Red Summer race riots, the option of looking away is untenable.
This is an elegant, powerful work that is destined to prompt both conversation and, one can only hope, change.
March 23, 2021
"you don't have enough boats
we came here head to toe
and now we are millions
and now we demand to sit upright
and so you don't have enough boats...
you said
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro race
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro
hope for a solution through the dying out
you said hope for the Negro dying
hope through the dying
hope for the dying out
the solution dying
you said dying. the Negro
the Negro dying
the Negro hope
hope the Negro
you said hope for dying
hope dying
dying
dying
you said hope"
Countless Schemes, pg. 59-60
This is an incredible collection of poems. Eve Ewing tells the story of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 using snippets of the official government report to preface her stunning poetry. I did not know anything about the 1919 riot, so I learned a lot through Ewing's work. My favorite poems include Countless Schemes, sightseers, upon seeing a picture of a car in a school book, barricade, and I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store.
we came here head to toe
and now we are millions
and now we demand to sit upright
and so you don't have enough boats...
you said
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro race
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro
hope for a solution through the dying out
you said hope for the Negro dying
hope through the dying
hope for the dying out
the solution dying
you said dying. the Negro
the Negro dying
the Negro hope
hope the Negro
you said hope for dying
hope dying
dying
dying
you said hope"
Countless Schemes, pg. 59-60
This is an incredible collection of poems. Eve Ewing tells the story of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 using snippets of the official government report to preface her stunning poetry. I did not know anything about the 1919 riot, so I learned a lot through Ewing's work. My favorite poems include Countless Schemes, sightseers, upon seeing a picture of a car in a school book, barricade, and I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store.
June 13, 2020
Reimagining, recreating historical documents into worthy poems is incredibly hard and I've rarely read any as brilliant as those by Ewing in this latest collection. Also, listening to her read these on audiobook was wonderful, a master class on how to read poetry.
August 10, 2020
"no, it goes like
Little Eugene W
So sorry to trouble you
Rise, Eugene, rise!
Calm your mama's cries!
Just sit up and look around,
Don't let em bury you down
I first heard Eve Ewing talk about this poetry collection on Fresh Air, and was inspired to read them. I ended up listening to the audiobook to help me fulfill a read harder challenge item, and I'm glad I listened to them.
Read for Book Riot's 2020 Read Harder challenge item: Read an audiobook of poetry.
Little Eugene W
So sorry to trouble you
Rise, Eugene, rise!
Calm your mama's cries!
Just sit up and look around,
Don't let em bury you down
I first heard Eve Ewing talk about this poetry collection on Fresh Air, and was inspired to read them. I ended up listening to the audiobook to help me fulfill a read harder challenge item, and I'm glad I listened to them.
Read for Book Riot's 2020 Read Harder challenge item: Read an audiobook of poetry.
December 11, 2020
This collection of poetry is historiographic, autoethnographic, and a brilliant read. I originally discovered this from analyzing one of the poems in a paper, but I’m so glad I read the collection as a whole.
February 14, 2021
This short book of poetry draws from, adds to, recontextualizes, and reimagines a governmental report on the 1919 race riot in Chicago. Although she primarily focuses on the race riots, Eve Ewing spans multiple time periods in this book: from the Great Migration to the Red Summer to the present day. While she covers multiple eras, Ewing expertly ties them together with a brief excerpt from the report leading almost every piece before diving into her stunning poetry.
Ewing is a wonderful writer and community presence, and I'm thankful every time I get the opportunity to learn from her.
Ewing is a wonderful writer and community presence, and I'm thankful every time I get the opportunity to learn from her.
May 21, 2022
3.5 stars
April 13, 2023
Tracy K. Smith says “While reading I found myself continually thinking, I had no idea you could make poetry do that, followed by, thank God she has done this.” I could not agree more. Moving, masterful. I learned so much.
June 8, 2023
Last book for my political violence class! Another collection of poetry and it was absolutely striking and beautiful. I was really interested in the structural elements of this book--whether it was the spacing, gaps, or pauses in the poems themselves. This has been on my TBR since winter quarter so it was nice to finally spend some time with it.
May 6, 2019
In 1919, my most anticipated book of the year, Ewing paints a history in verse of the city before, during, and after the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, sparked when a black boy at 31st Street Beach drifted over the invisible lines of segregation and was stoned and drowned. When the police officer wouldn’t arrest the white man judged responsible, riots unspooled across the South Side. Ewing’s poems are each inspired by an excerpt from a 1922 report The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot, that tried to capture the state of black people in Chicago at the time.
In Ewing’s poems, the city itself comes alive. The trains sing of the Great Migration; the streetcar mourns in the midst of the riots. In “True Stories About the Great Fire,” the Fire itself speaks: the report says that some called the “Negro invasion of the district” a worse disaster than the Fire; in Ewing’s poem, the Fire refuses to leave a city that wanted them. In the midst of all of this, domestic workers struggle and a former schoolteacher mourns his invisibility.
Ewing captures the horror, desperation, and fear that haunted the week of the riots and its roots in structural racism. Eugene drowns: “Jump / Rope” tells us this in the format of children’s jump-rope rhymes, emphasizing his youth, emphasizing the normalcy of a black boy dying at white hands while chilling you to the bone with its combo of nostalgia and horror. Ewing titles one excerpt about black men being stalked and hunted through the Loop: “there is no poem for this.” Ewing writes of Daley and his involvement in the Hamburg Athletic Club, among the instigators of the rioting. “sightseers” decimates the residents of Chicago who are complicit, who enjoy the city without ever engaging its current or past horrors. I read it five times and all five it left me in tears.
The collection does not end in the past—after all, neither do the reverberations, nor the story of Chicago’s racism. An erasure/blackout poem created out of the email Ewing’s apartment building sent her the day of the Jason Van Dyke trial, warning residents of how to stay safe in case of violence. Ewing’s book continues on into the future. In one poem, children turn towards a voice that has told them it’s almost time; the adults can only follow. Ewing ends the collection with a poem I’ve been lucky enough to see her read: “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store,” a quiet wish for a different present, a parallel past, where Emmett Till carefully handles plums, saying, “it goes, it goes,” a quiet push towards a continuing present that Till never got to experience.
1919 is a brilliant book both of history and poetry. It tells of a moment in Chicago’s history that its residents don’t learn enough about, and it tells it through chilling, impactful, and gorgeous verse. Ewing’s newest is (naturally) a must-read.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. 1919 comes out June 4 from Haymarket Books.
In Ewing’s poems, the city itself comes alive. The trains sing of the Great Migration; the streetcar mourns in the midst of the riots. In “True Stories About the Great Fire,” the Fire itself speaks: the report says that some called the “Negro invasion of the district” a worse disaster than the Fire; in Ewing’s poem, the Fire refuses to leave a city that wanted them. In the midst of all of this, domestic workers struggle and a former schoolteacher mourns his invisibility.
Ewing captures the horror, desperation, and fear that haunted the week of the riots and its roots in structural racism. Eugene drowns: “Jump / Rope” tells us this in the format of children’s jump-rope rhymes, emphasizing his youth, emphasizing the normalcy of a black boy dying at white hands while chilling you to the bone with its combo of nostalgia and horror. Ewing titles one excerpt about black men being stalked and hunted through the Loop: “there is no poem for this.” Ewing writes of Daley and his involvement in the Hamburg Athletic Club, among the instigators of the rioting. “sightseers” decimates the residents of Chicago who are complicit, who enjoy the city without ever engaging its current or past horrors. I read it five times and all five it left me in tears.
The collection does not end in the past—after all, neither do the reverberations, nor the story of Chicago’s racism. An erasure/blackout poem created out of the email Ewing’s apartment building sent her the day of the Jason Van Dyke trial, warning residents of how to stay safe in case of violence. Ewing’s book continues on into the future. In one poem, children turn towards a voice that has told them it’s almost time; the adults can only follow. Ewing ends the collection with a poem I’ve been lucky enough to see her read: “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store,” a quiet wish for a different present, a parallel past, where Emmett Till carefully handles plums, saying, “it goes, it goes,” a quiet push towards a continuing present that Till never got to experience.
1919 is a brilliant book both of history and poetry. It tells of a moment in Chicago’s history that its residents don’t learn enough about, and it tells it through chilling, impactful, and gorgeous verse. Ewing’s newest is (naturally) a must-read.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. 1919 comes out June 4 from Haymarket Books.
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