What parents, saddled (however joyously!) with children can read these lines from Lee Chilcote’s poem, “Before Kids, We Owned the City” and not recognize themselves:
Now we walk past the bars
on the way to the playground.
Now the jars of pasta sauce tremble
when they see us coming,
kids packed into the grocery cart,
waving their arms like drunken crane operators…
This is one of many ruefully funny, knowing looks at parenthood that counter the lyrical solemnity of these brooding meditations on Cleveland. How to Live in Ruins, haunted by the ghosts of Harvey Pekar, Tamir Rice, and Chilcote’s own boyhood self, brings Cleveland in all its rough beauty, its poetry of ruins, to vivid, hardscrabble life. These poems will be as familiar to Clevelanders as lake effect snow, the anguish of a Browns fan, or bridges rusting above the Cuyahoga.
–George Bilgere, award-winning author of Blood Pages and other books
Every city needs its bards–poets who want to sing their life and the life of their city in the same songs. Cleveland has had Hart Crane, Russell Atkins, d.a. levy, Alberta Turner, George Bilgere, Ray McNiece, and Mary Weems, among others. Add Lee Chilcote to the list, for his daily witness of our rough city, a “patch of blight to call home” that seems both ruin and revelation. In Chilcote’s poems, which alternate between bemusing and poignant, “the city presses its tongue in your mouth.” He helps me see this complicated city again.
–Philip Metres, award-winning author of Sand Opera and other books
Lee Chilcote has written a beautifully crafted homage to Cleveland; one that manages to embrace the complications of both parenthood and urban living. Far from reverential, these poems are tributes nevertheless–suffused with a dark humor, clarity, and empathy that overrides the sometimes knotty reality of life in the Rust Belt.
–Kelly Fordon, author of Garden for the Blind
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