Electric Arches

By Eve L. Ewing

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the fantastical, Ewing takes us from the streets of Chicago to an alien arrival in an unspecified future, deftly navigating boundaries of space, time, and reality with delight and flexibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Aug 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781608468690

Eve L. Ewing

Dr. Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of education and a writer from Chicago. She is the author of Electric Arches, which received awards from the American Library Association and the Poetry Society of America and was named one of the year's best books by NPR and the Chicago Tribune. She is also author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side and the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues. 

Book preview

A note of introduction

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.

true stories

Arrival Day

Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions.

—Assata Shakur

it happened under cover of night or early morning

depending on who you ask. 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

Reviews for Electric Arches

[kcshankd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Delightful poems from a Chicago artist who is also a great twitter follow. The form and feel vary throughout, I liked this very much.

[carriewuj · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful compilation of verse and art of personal experience, but translatable into universal understanding, empathy, compassion. In her introduction, Ewing says "This book is about my life and maybe also your life." and the foreword in the book notes "Poets fill in the spaces other types of storytelling can't always reach." That's the connection this book fosters. Ewing is an important voice in Chicago -- focusing on sociology in education at U of C and equity in CPS. "Ignore Eve Ewing at your own intellectual, political, and cultural peril." says Chicago magazine. Read this and you won't want to.