1919

"Eve L. Ewing’s 1919 poetically depicts the context of the Chicago race riot of 1919 with searing pain and intimacy. In that year, many black Chicagoans who’d recently arrived in the Great Migration from the South were forced to confront the brutal limits of a segregated North. Ewing’s poems give voice to those whose historical memory was drawn in dispossession and often informed by the biblical themes of exodus and deliverance. I recommend 1919 because it holds a mirror up to America, to Chicago: a city where the fault lines of American history tremble underfoot, where the promise of America is betrayed by its past."