Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

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.

Love that excerpt from the Great Fire poem, and I love poetry mixed with images. Putting this one on my list. Thanks Jenna.

Thanks for reading, S.! The Great Fire poem was one of my favorites. I think you'd like the whole thing.

In a sort of epigraph to the Great Fire poem, Ewing reveals that the poem was inspired by a passage in a nonfiction text stating that there were people at the time who believed African American migration "was the worst calamity that had struck the city since the Great Fire."