Eve L. Ewing - Electric Arches

Reading Eve L. Ewings Electric Arches is such an awakening and active experiencethis book time travels. Recall this, writes Ewing in Shea Butter Manifesto, both as invitation and as spellbinding command. Im awestruck by the rigor and intimacy of this book, by its insistent love for both black past and black future. Ewing leaves no unnamed ritual uncovered, no implicit idiom uncelebrated. This book is a gift, a visual and lyrical offering to be treasured as gospel.

Morgan Parker, author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonc Of course she had me at Koko Taylor. She had me again at shea butter and Ron Artest and especially at an eerily intriguing fur suit. This is an effusive celebration of black girlhood in all its muted but relentless sparkle, a tenacious exploration of all its lives, the wide-aloud witnessing of a born storyteller slicing her two-wheeler through the streets of a broken and boisterous city. You wont believe this is Eve Ewings first book. Its that assured, that crafted. Ever heard Koko Taylors guttural growl, the lyric that floors you like a backhand slap? Its that too.

Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art I didnt think it was possible for one book to contain work and worlds that would be loved by eight-year-olds and eighty-year-olds, junior-high-school dropouts and emeritus English professors. I didnt think it was possible for one book to contain the emotional sweat of Chicago, Dorchester, and Yazoo City, Mississippi. I didnt 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 Electric 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 Again and again reading Eve Ewings 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 born of rigorous attention coupled with critical love. Thankfully, theres a word for all that: tenderness. And the joy is that we learn tenderness by witnessing it. Which is to say, and its not too much to say, this book is one of the maps to our survival. Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude Electric Arches Eve L.

Ewing to Leilaandto all the fire city children 2017 Eve L. Ewing Published in 2017 by Haymarket Books P.O. Box 180165 Chicago, IL 60618 773-583-7884 www.haymarketbooks.org ISBN: 978-1-60846-856-0 Trade distribution: In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International, This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund. Printed in Canada by union labor. Cover design by Brett Neimann. Cover artwork, Garden of Lost Things, by Brianna McCarthy.

Interior artwork by Eve L. Ewing. Artifacts, appearing on pages 1011, photographed by Ivn Arenas. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I knew I was thoroughly caught by Eve Ewings debut collection when I found myself cryingbut my spirit also laughingafter I read the first time [a re-telling] and ended up sharing stories with my husband about our first, or worst, times facing racism from strangers. Ewings work reminds me of the reasons I began writing myself, in search of expression or escape that could dull the sharp edges of my life.

I, too, have ridden a flying bicycle. Poets fill in the spaces other types of storytelling cant always reachchildhood memories, the pain of racism, a definitive sense of place and loss. Ewings work is honest, evocative, surprising, and somehow all the more real for its escapes into the magical. These pieces shine with urgency, truth, and powerful vestiges of childhood. The black speculative artsscience fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realismare gaining more notice for their ability to show us whats actually real, what matters in the now, and Ewings work falls nicely within a growing community of writers who are leading us through future dreams and glimpses of magic. Electric Arches is a web we are happy to be caught up in.

This collection is delightful. Tananarive Due

When I was a little girl, I was allowed to ride my bicycle from one end of the block to the other, because that way my mother could come outside and stand on the sidewalk and see me. Chicago is very flat, so when you stand outside and look down the street you can pretty much see to the end of the planet. Anyway, as I rode my bike I would narrate, in my head, all of my adventures. In my head I was shooting arrows, exploring dungeons, solving mysteries. In this way, my block became the backdrop of infinite possibility, even if the reality of the cracked cement and the brick wall facing our window and the gangs seemed to constrain that possibility.

The space in my head was as real to me as the dirt beneath my feet. This book is about my life and maybe also your life. And it is about the places we invent. Every story in it is absolutely true. Some of the stories are from the past and some are from the future. In the future, every child in Chicago has food and a safe place to sleep, and mothers laugh all day and eat Popsicles.

Every Fourth of July there are big fireworks and no one shoots a gun, not even police because there are no police, and when you go downtown and look up at the sky, the electric arches stretch so far toward heaven that you feel like you might be the smallest and most important thing ever to be born. Thanks for reading. I appreciate you. e.e.

Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. the hour when the press stops running. when the baker arrives and unlocks the door. the cables came down, silent and charcoal, matte and slithering. they hit the earth and coiled at the foot of a tree, on a bus-stop bench, atop a mound of cigarette butts in front of the dialysis center. later when the NASA boys looked for footage of the arrival surely some security camera in some parking lot, somewhere in America?that hour was all blank, everywhere, all blank, like as if each of them had a magnet for a beating heart, their veins murmuring clear it away, clear it away, until the tape was empty. in the years before, when hateful men warned of the coming, crushing aluminum cans in their hands while their friends threw darts, or in rowboats tying flies, they spoke only of darkness. their eyes will be dirt, the men said, and they will cover the windows with tar in the places where we talk to god. they will seize our daughters who will return to us in rags, holding mud babies and asking for a room to sleep. the hateful men and their wives wore reading glasses and drank cinnamon tea on the days when they wrote letters to each other about how the coming people would steal, how they loved the sound of grinding teeth in place of real music, how the girl ones were greedy and lustful and felt no pain but made endless noise and how small ones could trick you, looking like children, but their skin was mercury and they could not be shot dead so do not fall for it. they wrote their letters on glass and plastic and metal. they said they are coming and they will paint everything black. so they had no words for the moon people when they did come. and the moon people could not be captured. camera lenses looking on them turned to salt and cast white trails across the eyelids of the looker. and the moon people were dressed in every color. they wore saffron yellow and Kool cigarette green and Georgia clay red and they wore violet, they wore violet. and they were loud. as their hands worked, hammering the iron of the jail cell doors into lovely wrought curls and bicycle chains, smashing the fare boxes at the train stations into wind chimes and bowing low to the passengers as they enteredsome sashaying through the turnstile, some dropping it low as they went underneath, they sang. the moon people had been listening all this time and they knew all about Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin and Mahalia Jackson and Marvin Gaye and Missy Elliott, and they sang while they smashed a bottle on the squad carsa Hennessy bottle or a Coke or a pressed kale juice, whatever was near enough to say this here is christened a new thing. and they drove them down my street and your street and your street, the tires painted to look like vinyl 45s and the children tied yarn and ribbons to the windshield wipers and the moon people turned them on high so that as they drove, the colors waved in the sunlight, which was now streaming so clearly onto the porch where i sat rubbing the rusting chain of the swing and thinking of grass when the boy down the street, who in smaller days I walked to school when his mother worked early, who loved lime popsicles the best, who danced his way from his own porch to the basketball court in the afternoon, who the police had recently declared a man, stopping him mid-two-step to ask questions he could not answer because the query beneath them was why are you alive and none of us can say, the boy, he came to me and walked up the steps where the paint is peeling and knelt at my side, and i did not look him in the eye. instead i watched a firefly, the first of the summer, land on his left shoulder, and i thought here are two glowing ones, but he did not notice, only held my hand and told me we are free now. and i could not believe i had lived to see itthe promised light, descended to us at last.