A People's History of Chicago

March 27, 2017
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.”

April 15, 2017
Chicago is under indictment for gun violence, police brutality, and racial segregation, but it is also a city of poetsCarl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks most famously, and now Coval (Schtick, 2013) adds his clarion hip-hop voice to the chorus. Inspired by Howard Zinn's paradigm-changing A People's History of the United States (1980), Coval begins with the fertile land's indigenous humans and the ruthless invaders who forced them from it. Struggles over land continued during the Great Migration and waves of immigration as racism, greed, corruption, and tyranny corralled people of color in enclaves without jobs or adequately funded schools: neighborhoods demarcated / sound nothing like democracy. In fast-breaking poems that bristle with vivid details and spiky truths, Coval praises social-justice movements and the arts, calling out such trailblazers as Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, Nelson Algren, Lorraine Hansberry, Muddy Waters, Harold Washington, and Frankie Knuckles, while also celebrating the wonders of dynamic urban life. Agile, wryly funny, righteous, and passionate, Coval declares: Chicago / you have my heart / split in two / like the city. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)