cover image A People’s History of Chicago

A People’s History of Chicago

Kevin Coval. Haymarket, $17 trade paper (150p) ISBN 978-1-60846-671-9

Coval, poet, educator, and coeditor of The Breakbeat Poets, composes a heartfelt song for his hometown and a trenchant account of its injustices. The collection’s 77 poems, one for each of Chicago’s neighborhoods, are organized chronologically. Coval begins precolonization, “before the steel plow/ & the leveling. before manicured lawns/ & forced removal,” and ends with the “shitty/ pizza & arctic weather” of the modern era. The cancers of racial discrimination, segregation, and poverty feature prominently in the story Coval tells, but Coval himself does not, instead focusing on heroic Chicagoans: Jean duSable, the city’s mixed-race founder, American socialist and union leader Eugene Debs, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Such poems can feel too dutiful, and at times the book threatens to become (to borrow the name of the mural from which Coval draws the title of his ode to graffiti) a “Wall of Respect.” But his evocations of his idols and the city’s plight are often stellar, full of rich riffs and smart wordplay—the el is a “working/ class/ spaceship,” and capitalism leaves “neighborhoods gutted. chest/ opened by a butcher/ block/ by block.” “I witness until the world does,” Coval writes in the voice of Ida B. Wells, and indeed, at its best, the book haunts readers “with the forgotten, those left out/ to/ hang/ like ghosts.” (Apr.)