Praise for A People’s History of Chicago

 

 

“I just read your new manuscript and got the same feeling I had some weeks ago when I was back in Chicago in a cab very early in the morning on my way to catch a train, the city shrouded in a misty rain, and as we passed what has always been one of my favorite historic intersections by the river at michigan and wacker (where once long long ago the freshly created soul of jazz poured out of the London House) there was this fucking sign, TRUMP, like an obscenity scrawled across chicago history, illuminated like a raw scar.  There’s that sense to your book, the scars of how the city was made are part of the architecture, of the landscape.”

—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship

 

“The stories and personalities memorialized in these poems are real to me. Poet Kevin Coval breathes them back alive with word-pictures both concrete and passionate, compressing centuries into verse. These are poems to be savored. I’d be hard-pressed to pick just one favorite from this remarkable collection.”

—Timuel D. Black, Chicago historian/activist/teacher, author of Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s First Wave of Black Migration

 

“Kevin Coval has given us a gift, a collection of heartfelt, piercing poems, stories really, about America’s city. Taken together, these song-like postcards are a kind of celebration, as well as some takedowns, of those who sweat and struggle and endure to make this city a better place. The book soars.”

—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here and Never a City So Real 

 

“From our first resident, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, to the immigrants, migrants, and souls who make this city great, a vibrant, dynamic collection of vignettes that expose the naked truth of our fair city.”

—Karen Lewis, teacher and president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Local 1

 

“Kevin Coval is a dazzling, dizzying time traveler and cultural historian-poet. He is a lover of language, rhythms, and colors and the people who transform in these. He knows the stories of Chicago and all its people—Red, Black, White, Brown, Asian, Queer, Straight. The spine of this book is the people’s resistance and struggle for justice and a fair shake. But—not to worry—Kevin puts it all to you so sweetly, so energetically, so for real—he makes you smile behind poem after poem. And then again he makes you want to rise up. He’s in the Chicago tradition—fire, earth, and endless blues.”

—Angela Jackson, author of Where I Must Go, winner of the American Book Award