Electric Arches

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose.
Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances-blues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects-hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook-as precious icons.
Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant-a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher's angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.
Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, artist, and educator from Chicago. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, New Republic, The Nation, The Atlantic, and many other publications. She is a sociologist at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.

List of contents

true stories

Arrival Day
the first time [a re-telling]
The Device
four boys on Ellis [a re-telling]
Sestina with Matthew Henson's Fur Suit
true stories about Koko Taylor
another time [a re-telling]
Note from LeBron James to LeBron James
Excerpts from an interview with Ron Artest
how i arrived

oil and water

Shea Butter Manifesto
why you cannot touch my hair
appletree [on blackwomanhood, from and to Erykah Badu]
what I mean when I say I'm sharpening my oyster knife
To Stacey, as you were
Ode to Luster's Pink Oil
one thousand and one ways to touch your own face
to the notebook kid
Thursday Morning, Newbury Street

letters from the flat lands

On Prince
Origin Story
fragment
Sonnet
Chicago is a chorus of barking dogs
at the salon
montage in a car
The Discount Mega Mall (In Memoriam)
I come from the fire city
Hood Run
One Good Time for Marilyn Mosby
Columbus Hospital
What I Talk About When I Talk About Black Jesus
at work with my father
Fullerton Avenue
Requiem for Fifth Period and the Things That Went On Then
untitled anti-elegy
I wish for them a mundane life
Affirmation

About the author

Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, artist, and educator from Chicago. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, The Atlantic, and many other venues. She is a sociologist at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.

Summary

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose.
Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing’s narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances—blues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects—hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook—as precious icons.
Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant—a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher’s angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.
Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, artist, and educator from Chicago. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, New Republic, The Nation, The Atlantic, and many other publications. She is a sociologist at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.

Additional text

"I didn't think it was possible for one book to contain work and worlds that would be loved by eight year olds and eighty year olds, jr high school dropouts and emeritus english professors. I didn't think it was possible for one book to contain the emotional sweat of Chicago, Dorchester and Yazoo City, Mississippi. I didn't think it was possible for one book to make us smell the residue of classroom erasers, empty White Castle bags and wet wondrous balls of Black girl hair clinging to the bottoms of bathtubs. With Electrics Arches, Eve Ewing has written a book I thought was un-write-able. The book is as precise as it is ambitious, pulling equally on shared memories and individual imagination. Every page feels like a beginning and end, an invitation and conclusion, but never in that order. Somehow Eve Ewing created a book that is at once formally spectacular and grounded enough to ask readers the two most important questions in art: will you stop to remember with me and will you help me change the world with that memory. Electric Arches is alive."
–Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division

 

Report

"Again and again reading Eve Ewing's Electric Arches I felt some blooming in my body, or some flock of herons batting into the air in my body, which I think was indicating something like joy at witnessing the imagination at work in these poems, the imagination borne of rigorous attention coupled with critical love. Thankfully, there's a word for all that: tenderness. And the joy is that we learn tenderness by witnessing it. Which is to say, and it's not too much to say, this book is one of the maps to our survival."
-Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Product details

• Authors: Eve L Ewing, Eve L. Ewing
• Publisher: Ingram Publisher Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.09.2017
• EAN: 9781608468560
• ISBN: 978-1-60846-856-0
• Subject: Fiction > Poetry, drama