Eve Ewing: Other Means to Liberation

Before I read Eve Ewing’s debut poetry collection, Electric Arches, I’d read her work in The New Yorker. I’d read her work in The Atlantic. I’d read her work in the New York Times. I’d read her tweets. I’d read her poems. I knew that she was a sociologist of education based at the University of Chicago whose research was focused on racism, social inequality, urban policy, and the impact of those forces on the lives of young people. So I should have been ready for her book.

I was not ready.

I didn’t think it was possible for one book to contain work and worlds that could be loved by eight-year-olds and eighty-year-olds. 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, Ewing has written a book I thought was unwriteable. Every page feels like a beginning and end, an invitation and conclusion, but never in that order.

Electric Arches, through an innovative use of visual art, prose, and verse, mediates and obliterates the tired arguments between craft and content, form and politics, Afrofuturism and Afropessimism. It pleads with us to remember, and/or accept, that if there are characters, there are real bodies. If there are real bodies, there are raced, classed, and gendered identities. If there are raced, classed, and gendered identities, there must be love. If there is love, too often in this nation there will be interpersonal and structural abuse. If there is abuse, there is denial. If there is denial, there is memory. If there is memory, there can be moral imagination. And when there is moral imagination, there can be breathtaking books.

Somehow Ewing has created a collection that is at once formally spectacular and grounded enough to ask readers the two most important questions in art: Will you stop to remember and imagine with me and will you help me change the world with memory and imagination? On a phone call during which we talked about everything from the wonders of shea butter to Assata Shakur, I