Full Description
Named Best Chicago Poet by The Chicago Reader, Kevin Coval channels Howard Zinn to celebrate the Windy City's hidden history. Known variously as the Windy City, the City of Big Shoulders or Chi-Raq, Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world. Chicago is the city of Gwendolyn Brooks and Chief Keef, Al Capone and Richard Wright, Lucy Parsons and Nelson Algren, Harold Washington and Studs Terkel. It is the city of Fred Hampton, House Music, and the Haymarket Martyrs. Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Coval's A People's History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These seventy-seven poems (for the city's seventy-seven neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city's workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social l
Contents
1. chicagu
2. shikaakwa
3. LaSalle wrote it down wrong
4. the father is a Black man
5. The Treaty of Chicago
6. player with railroads
7. hog butcher for the world
8. Albert Parsons can hang
9. how to be down
10. the L gets open
11. the white city
12. Eugene Debs reads Marx in prison
13. reversing the flow / \ / of the Chicago river
14. The Burnham Plan of Chicago
15. The Great Migration
16. The Eastland Disaster
17. the murder of Eugene Williams
18. Society for Human Rights
19. Thomas Dorsey, Gospel's Daddy
20. Katherine Dunham opens her dance school
21. Gwendolyn Brooks stands in The Mecca
22. The South Side Writer's Group (a broke cento)
23. Hansberry vs. Lee
24. Muddy Waters goes electric
25. Nelson Algren meets Simone de Beauvoir at the palmer house
26. pickle with a peppermint stick
27. Sun Ra becomes a synthesizer
28. hugh hefner, a play boy
29. the Black monk of wrigley field
30. University of Illinois-Chicago
31. at the Roberts Temple Church of G-d, 4021 S. State St.
32. The Division Street Riots
33. Martin Luther King prays in marquette park
34. Chicago/america's greatest listener
35. Carl Sandburg Village (where my parents met)
36. Wall of Respect
37. AfriCOBRA
38. the wrestler: a chicago poster boy
39. The Assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton
40. Ray Yoshida, Chicago Imagist, Dotted Charmer
41. don l. lee becomes Haki Madhubuti
42. The Chicago 21 Plan
43. new town
44. leaving Aldine
45. Disco Demolition
46. mayor byrne moves into & out of Cabrini Green
47. Ron Hardy plays the record backwards
48. the assignation of Rudy Lozano
49. Marc Smith invents the poetry slam
50. collateral damage
51. The Day Harold Died
52. the year Michael Jordan breaks the law
53. patronage
54. fresh to death
55. molemen beat tapes
56. mayor daley wishes the white city (a Chi-ku)
57. Graffiti Blasters: an erasure
58. NAFTA
59. The 1994 World Cup (a second city improv sketch)
60. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act
61. The Etymology of Chicago Joe
62. Common's Resurrection
63. the supreme court makes color illegal
64. Erasing the Green
65. Ida B. Wells testifies in the ghost town of The Ida B. Wells Homes
66. how to teach poetry in Chicago public schools
67. Lenard Clark peddles for air
68. baby come on: an ode to footwork
69. Juice serves eminem at Scribble Jam
70. A Moratorium on the Death Penalty
71. praise the house party
72. Día de las Madres
73. the crown fountain in millennium park
74. Kanye says what's on everybody's mind
75. The White Sox win the World Series: Pop's ars poetica
76. the coach is a bear
77. i wasn't in grant park when obama was elected
78. Republic Window Workers Sit-in
79. A Eulogy for Jeff Maldonado Jr.
80. the night the modern wing was bombed
81. Falling Up
82. when King Louie first heard the word chiraq
83. an elegy for Dr. Margaret Burroughs
84. a dedication to the inaugural poet
85. rod blagojevich at the end of his run
86. #HeyMa is trending on Mother's Day
87. memoir of the red x
88. Teachers Strike in The Chicago Tradition
89. we real
90. standards
91. during Ramadan the gates of heaven are open
92. Chicago Cultural Center: a battle rap
93. Ms. Devine explains the meaning of Modern Art: a found poem
94. 82 shot, 14 murdered: the two cities celebrate independence day
95. why Derrick Rose
96. We Charge Genocide
97. there is a target on the grave of Cabrini Green
98. atoning for the neo-liberal in all or rahm emmanuel as the chicken on Kapparot
99. 400 days
100. Chicago has my heart
