Toward Camden

Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study

by Mercy Romero

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold.

Genres: Nonfiction

136 pages, Hardcover

Published December 17, 2021

About the author

Mercy Romero is Associate Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Sonoma State University.

Reviews

[Geena Zebrasky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in urban geography, or cities in general. Written in beautiful prose, Romero explores the complexities of growing up in a neighborhood abandoned by global capital and that is followed by stereotypes and urban renewal that do little for the residents of Camden. It’s an exploration of the meaning of home, self, and community, and it’s an important and incredible read.

[maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deeply moving, necessary shift in the epistemic violence of gentrification and displacement. While I understand and commend the focus on the residents as experienced during Romero's time as a resident of Cramer Hill, I wonder whether the frame of carcerality might have better included the indigenous peoples who have their own relationship to the process by which land and Black life become property