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Yesterday’s centennial anniversary of the Chicago Race Riot compelled me to dig into 1919, @eveewing ‘s new book of poems abt this pogrom & the Great Migration refugees who settled in Chicago from the south in the early 1900s. It is superb.
I am so moved by this presentation of the interior lives of those who fled southern violence w/ dreams & hopes & found disappointment & northern oppression.There are devastating lines that have stayed in my head: “The lash lives in their shoulders.”
And this devatating jewel @eveewing: “hearts broken at their belief/that leaving the darkness/meant finding the sun.” Whew! The poem “sightseers” speaks directly into this moment - challenging those who Hannah Arendt cautions “never made up their minds to be good or evil.”
Here it is: @eveewing ‘s 1919. A powerful poetic examination of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. Buy it. 
