City of the Big Shoulders

“From the stockyard to the speakeasy, the steakhouse to the flophouse, the top of the Hancock tower to the thirteenth floor of an east-side tenement, what this eclectic gathering of poets shares is a commitment to honoring Chicago’s roots. Infused with a passion beyond the reach of prose, here is an ‘intimate ethnography’—part torch song, part folk song, part ballad, part dirge—of a city both ‘on the make’ and ‘on the take.’”—Suzanne Buffam, author, The Irrationalist

“What is so striking about this anthology of Chicago poetry is how much it is a poetry of arrival and departure—Iowans and Texans and others who chose the city, because once they spent time in this city which then chose them. This anthology is as much about facing the pleasures and demands of urban America as it is specifically about Chicago, as when Campbell McGrath observes that ‘money courses through Chicago’s veins like the essence urging the redbuds into bloom’: he takes note of America, not just Chicago.”—Bin Ramke, author, Theory of Mind: New and Selected Poems, 1978–2008

“A city like Chicago deserves an anthology of this scope: bursting with the life lived on the streets in the Loop and alive with childhood memories as seen from the city’s neighborhood windows. Ryan Van Cleave has collected a prodigious swath of poems from writers commemorating their Chicago, a city as big in our imaginations as it is from the view at Promontory Point Park.”—Joshua Marie Wilkinson, author, Selenography

For an interview with Ryan in the Huffington Post, please click here.