In this multi-generational anthology, 37 living poets from Louisville archive the traditions and icons, landmarks and spirits, portraits and memories most personal to this shared place. Once a City Said takes the River City's narrative out of the mouths of politicians, news anchors and police chiefs, and puts it into the mouths of poets—those ancient storyteller griots. What emerges is an intimate report of the socioeconomic circumstances of a city misshapen by segregation, a growing tourism industry, and subsequent ruptures in the public trust. In this collection of versifiers, each voice is just one in a community choir singing neglected stories and new visionary songs.
In this multi-generational anthology, 37 living poets from Louisville archive the traditions and icons, landmarks and spirits, portraits and memories most personal to this shared place. Once a City Said takes the River City's narrative out of the mouths of politicians, news anchors and police chiefs, and puts it into the mouths of poets—those ancient storyteller griots. What emerges is an intimate report of the socioeconomic circumstances of a city misshapen by segregation, a growing tourism industry, and subsequent ruptures in the public trust. In this collection of versifiers, each voice is just one in a community choir singing neglected stories and new visionary songs.
Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology
Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology
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Overview
In this multi-generational anthology, 37 living poets from Louisville archive the traditions and icons, landmarks and spirits, portraits and memories most personal to this shared place. Once a City Said takes the River City's narrative out of the mouths of politicians, news anchors and police chiefs, and puts it into the mouths of poets—those ancient storyteller griots. What emerges is an intimate report of the socioeconomic circumstances of a city misshapen by segregation, a growing tourism industry, and subsequent ruptures in the public trust. In this collection of versifiers, each voice is just one in a community choir singing neglected stories and new visionary songs.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781956046090 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Sarabande Books |
| Publication date: | 06/20/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
V. Joshua Adams is the author of a chapbook, Cold Affections (Plan B Press, 2018). Work of his has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Posit, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. A former editor of Chicago Review, as well as a translator and critic, he teaches literature and writing at the University of Louisville.
makalani bandele is a Louisville native and Affrilachian Poet. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, Millay Colony, Kentucky Arts Council, and Vermont Studio Center. Currently a candidate for the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky, bandele’s work has been published in several anthologies and widely in literary journals. The author of hellfightin’ and under the aegis of a winged mind, awarded the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, poems from under the aegis have been published in Prairie Schooner, 32poems, and North American Review.
Mackenzie Berry is from Louisville, Kentucky. Her poetry has been published in Vinyl, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart, and Blood Orange Review, among others. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison through the First Wave Program and Goldsmiths, University of London, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Cornell University. Her debut poetry collection 'Slack Tongue City' is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2022. You can find her work at mackenzieberry.com.
Steve Cambron’s poetry has appeared in Literary Leo, Word Hotel and Heartland Trail Review and have one two Green River Writers awards. His poetry was choreographed and featured in the Louisville Ballet’s 2018 Choreographer’s Showcase. He is the creator and host of Flying Out Loud, a monthly reading series featuring some of Louisville’s finest writers and poets. He is currently working on an MFA at the Eastern Kentucky UniversityBluegrass Writer’s Studio.
Jeremy Michael Clark’s poems have appeared in West Branch, Poetry Northwest, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice and Rutgers University-Newark, where he received his MFA. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, he is a licensed social worker living in Brooklyn.
Bernard Clay is a Louisville, Kentucky, native who grew up in the shadow of the now demolished Southwick housing projects on the “West End” of town. He has spent most of his life in Kentucky cultivating an appreciation, over the years, for the state’s disappearing natural wonders and unique but sparse urban areas. Bernard received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky Creative Writing Program and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets collective. His work has been published in various journals and anthologies. He currently resides on a farm in eastern Kentucky with his wife Lauren. English Lit is his first book.
Darcy Cleaver, teacher, poet, and playwright, lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her wife and four dogs. Darcy moved away in the '80s to pursue the gay agenda; she was overjoyed to return years later to a much more inclusive city.
Ron Davis is a poet and visual artist whose narrative works range from social commentary to afrofuturism, often intertwining the societal with the speculative. a louisville native, he now resides in lexington, ky with his partner Crystal Wilkinson.
A native of Louisville’s West End, Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of dying in the scarecrow’s arms, \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award, and Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem, an NAACP Image Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee. He is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow in poetry, a Cave Canem alum, and Associate Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).
Hannah Drake is a blogger, activist, public speaker, poet, and author of 11 books. She writes commentary on politics, feminism, and race and her work has been featured online at Cosmopolitan, The Bitter Southerner, The Lily, Harper’s Bazaar and Revolt TV. Hannah is the author of several works of poetry, Hannah‘s Plea-Poetry for the Soul, Anticipation, Life Lived In Color, In Spite of My Chains, For Such A Time As This and So Many Things I Want to Tell You-Life Lessons for the Journey. Hannah was selected as one of the Best of the Best in Louisville, Kentucky for her poem Spaces and recently was honored as a Kentucky Colonel, the highest title of honor bestowed by the Kentucky Governor recognizing an individual’s noteworthy accomplishments and outstanding service to community, state, and nation. In 2021 Hannah work as an activist and poet was profiled in the New York Times, highlighting her work and the (Un)Known Project that seeks to recognize the known and unknown names of Black people that were enslaved in Kentucky and throughout the nation.
Jessica Farquhar is the author of Dear Motorcycle Enthusiast, a chapbook published by The Magnificent Field in 2020. She holds an MFA from Purdue, where she was the assistant director of Creative Writing. You can find her work in recent issues of Can We Have Our Ball Back? and Bear Review.
Isiah Fish is a queer poet & performer from Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois UniversityCarbondale where he worked as an editor for Crab Orchard Review. His work has been published in Albion Review, Blood Orange Review, Foglifter, & Miracle Monocle.
Robin Garner is a spoken word artist, published poet, host & keynote speaker. She utilizes her passion for poetry & spoken word to uplift, encourage and ignite her audience. Inspired by own adversities and triumphs, she is best known for her raw, transparent and uncensored narrative in regards to women and their struggle with loving, living and maintaining their own identity.
Martha Greenwald is the Founding Director of WhoWeLostKY.org, a project encouraging Kentuckians to write about loved ones lost to Covid-19. She is the winner of the 2020 Yeats Prize for Poetry. Her first collection of poetry, Other Prohibited Items, was the winner of the Mississippi Review Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in such journals as New World Writing, The Threepenny Review, Slate, Poetry, The Sewanee Review and Best New Poets. She has held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and been awarded fellowships from the North Carolina and Kentucky Arts Councils, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writer’s Conferences, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center. She taught as an adjunct professor for eighteen years at the University of Louisville.
David Haydon is a poet and essayist originally from Springfield, KY. David is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California, studying nonfiction. David's work explores Southern queerness, maternity, and significations of the body.
David Higdon is a writer from Kentucky. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Exposition Review, Lucky Jefferson, Coffin Bell Journal, Naugatuck River Review, and the tiny journal. He is the 2021 winner of The Grand Prix Prize from the Kentucky State Poetry Society. He lives with his family in Louisville, Ky.
John James is the author of The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, PEN Poetry Series, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Raised in Louisville, he is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Erin Keane is the author of three collections of poems and is the editor of The Louisville Anthology from Belt Publishing. She is editor in chief at Salon.com and is on the faculty of Spalding University's School of Creative and Professional Writing. She lives in Louisville.
Anna Leigh Knowles is the author of Conditions of The Wounded (Wisconsin Poetry Series, 2021). Her work appears in Blackbird, Indiana Review, Memorious, The Missouri Review Online, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, storySouth, Hunger Mountain, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Tin House Online. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, she has also received scholarships from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, Bear River Writers’ Workshop, the New Harmony Writers’ Workshop, the San Miguel de Allende Writers’ Conference, and a Female Leadership Residency at Omega Institution. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and a BA from University of Colorado-Denver. For more information, visit annaleighknowles.com.
Kristi Maxwell is the author of seven books of poems, including My My (Saturnalia Books, 2020); Realm Sixty-four, editor's choice for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize; Hush Sessions, editor's choice for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; and Re-, finalist for the National Poetry Series. She's an associate professor of English at the University of Louisville.
Kentucky poet, folklorist, and educator Sarah McCartt-Jackson's work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Indiana Review, Journal of American Folklore, The Maine Review, Tidal Basin Review, The Louisville Review, and others. She is the recipient of an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, and has served as artist-in-residence for four National Parks: Great Smoky Mountains, Acadia, Catoctin Mountain National Park, and Homestead. She is the author of Stonelight (Airlie Press), which won the Phillip H. McMath Award, Weatherford Award in Poetry, and Airlie Prize. Her chapbooks include Calf Canyon (selected for publication by Louisville poet Kiki Petrosino), Vein of Stone, and Children Born on the Wrong Side of the River. She is an elementary school teacher in Jefferson County.
Erin L. McCoy holds an MFA in creative writing and an MA in Hispanic studies from the University of Washington. Her work has appeared in the "Best New Poets" anthology twice, selected by Natalie Diaz and Kaveh Akbar. She won second place in the 2019–2020 Rougarou Poetry Contest, judged by CAConrad, and is currently a finalist for the Missouri Review’s 2021 Miller Audio Prize. Her poetry and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in West Branch, Narrative, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Nimrod International Journal, and other publications. She is from Louisville, Kentucky. Her website is erinlmccoy.com.
Glenna Meeks is an emerging poet and filmmaker from Louisville, Kentucky. She lives in NYC and comes back to Louisville yearly. Her poems have been published in The London Reader and Taunt Magazine. She is writing a memoir about the people and places that have made her.
Sunshine Meyers is a self-professed Louisville native, speech-language pathologist, artist, and closet poet. While these titles may seem disparate, they each convey her primary passions of communication and self-expression. As a bisexual woman and survivor of long-term abuse with PTSD, Sunshine aims to use her poetry to embolden the voice of others who are all too used to living in silence.
Marta Miranda-Straub is a poet and storyteller who has spent her life working towards equity and inclusion and advancing social and economic justice for marginalized communities. She is the author of Cradled by Skeletons: A Life in Poems and Essays (Shadelandhouse Modern Press 2019). Until the age of twelve Marta was raised in Pinar del Rio, Cuba. Marta now lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky, and she describes herself affectionately as a Cubalachian—a combination of Cuban and Appalachian. She was inducted into the Affrilachian Poets by Frank X Walker in 2009. For many years she was the director of the Center for Women & Families in Louisville. Marta is a queer Latinx woman who lives and works at the intersection of identities, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexualities—applying an intersectional feminist lens to all she does. She has over forty years of experience in organizational and clinical social work practice, during which she has held multiple roles, including professor, social researcher, author, psychotherapist, executive leader, fundraising professional, community organizer, advocate/activist, executive coach, facilitator, trainer, and public speaker.
Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Surrender, a poetry chapbook, Lost Girls, a short story collection, and Abide, a poetry chapbook forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press. Her poetry has appeared in The Clackamas Literary Review, Juked, Gastronomica, and Inscape, among other journals. Morris won top prize in the 2008 Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition and was a finalist for the 2019 and 2020 Rita Dove Poetry Prize.
Lance G. Newman is a 'Renaissance Man' who wears several hats; the writer, the poet, the actor, the playwright, the artist, the teacher and the student. He is affectionately refer to as 'Mr. SpreadLove,' and for the past twenty years, he's been trying to put the l-o-v-e in Louisville.
Nguyễn Vũ Ngọc Uyên is a Vietnamese-American immigrant, a social worker and a therapist. She lives in South Louisville with her husband and their two cats and two dogs.
The work of Robert L. Penick has appeared in The Louisville Review, The Pikeville Review, Kudzu, Literary LEO and Trajectory within Kentucky, and journals like The Hudson Review, North American Review and Plainsongs without. More of his work can be found at theartofmercy.net
Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. She is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, The Atlantic, and Kenyon Review among others, as well as in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Joy is currently an Inprint MD Anderson Foundation fellow and doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
Ryan Ridge was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of four chapbooks as well as five books, including *New Bad News* (Sarabande Books 2020). His writing has appeared in American Book Review, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, Passages North, Post Road, Salt Hill, Santa Monica Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. An assistant professor at Weber State Universityin Ogden, Utah, he codirects the Creative Writing Program. In addition to his work as a writer and teacher, he edits the literary magazine Juked, and lives in Salt Lake City with the writer Ashley Farmer. He plays bass in the Snarlin’ Yarns.
Alex Shull is a long time Louisvillian, lifelong poet and software developer by trade.
Rheonna Nicole is a poet, artist, spoken word competitor and entrepreneur. A native Louisvillian, she graduated from Valley High School and studied commercial arts at Murray State University. Rheonna has been a featured speaker at The National Council of Negro Women's Martin Luther King Jr. brunch, Girls IdeaFest, World Festival, Kentucky Women's Writers Conference, Louisville Literary Arts reading series and Indiana UniversityPoetry Festival. She has been featured in Today's Woman Magazine, Leo Weekly, Insider Louisville, Courier Journal, and Spalding University’s Art & Literary Hotel. In 2016 she competed in the Women of the World Poetry Slam, ranking sixth place amongst 96 other female spoken word artists in the nation. Now a published poet, she has created her own organization called Lipstick Wars Poetry Slam (a partnership with ArtsReach of the Kentucky Center for the Arts), an all-woman poetry slam competition where she offers a platform for poets to speak out against the injustices and celebrations of womanhood.
Aileen Tierney is currently based in Louisville, Kentucky. She holds a BA in English from the University of Kentucky.
Alissa Vance is a community activist, poet, and writer, born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. In her daily life, Alissa fights for housing and racial equity, freedom and liberty for all people, and justice still for Travis Nagdy and Breonna Taylor.
Ken Walker is the author of Twenty Glasses of Water (Diez, 2014) and Antworten (Greying Ghost, 2017). His work can be found in Boston Review, Hyperallergic, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Brooklyn Rail, The Seattle Review, Atlas Review, Lumberyard, Tammy, and many other publications.
Jasmine Wigginton is a youth worker and a writer from Louisville, Kentucky, and is currently located in Baltimore, Maryland. Through her writing, she explores intergenerational trauma, her ancestors, and the inherent magic of being Black and from Kentucky.
Read an Excerpt
In the Shadow of the Spires
The poets are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t, statesmen don’t, priests don’t, union leaders don’t. Only the poets. . . Something awful is happening to a civilization when it ceases to produce poets and when it ceases to believe in the report that only poets can make.
—James Baldwin
In June 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, I drove four days from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I’d been in residence at an artists’ fellowship, to my new home in Houston, Texas. Me and the 19 other artists there had been in a strict quarantine by order of the Massachusetts governor for several months, but the fellowship itself had already been a sort of socially isolating, off-grid experience—designed, as it were, so that we were at the very tip of the Cape in Provincetown during its tourist off-season, between the wintry months of October and April, surrounded by the sea. Most days it was dark by 3:30pm. Most days it hovered around 28 degrees. I bought a SAD lamp. I walked the cobblestoned ghost streets with my dog Luna. Then COVID hit, the requisite stay-in-place moratorium dropped, and a fatal rush of New Yorkers fleeing to their summer homes on the Cape bloated the tiny fishing town. Because the only way out was through a virus ravaged New York, our stay was extended to June 15. When me and Raul—a wood sculptor I had become close with over the course of the residency—pulled out of the parking lot on June 13, we drove off of the physical and existential island and into an America-on-fire.
On the way to Houston, Raul and I, and my dog Luna, made several pitstops in Southern cities where we had friends or family, to take a break from driving. Little did we know it would be a tour through the country’s other crisis. Our first stop was Richmond, Virginia, where Raul had finished his MFA in sculpture. When we arrived, we immediately drove down Monument Avenue—its parade of Confederate statues lining the street’s median, leading up to the ultimate monument: a 21-foot-tall, 12-ton bronze statue of Robert E. Lee on a horse, which sat atop a 40-foot marble base in the middle of a roundabout. Virginians protesting the murder of George Floyd just two weeks before had already torn down the Jefferson Davis statue and, in the wake of these protests, Virginia’s governor ordered the removal of the Lee statue at a later date—probably owing more to reasons of safety than political commitment. As we approached the 60-foot leviathan on foot, I was rocked by the sight of rainbow graffiti covering it like kudzu and Black children climbing it or dancing around its base. It had been claimed and conquered. The people of Richmond had said what they needed to say.
After Richmond, we stopped for two days at my parents’ home in Louisville, Kentucky, where I’d grown up, and where I’d left, finally, to pursue my career as a writer at the age of 26, five years earlier in 2015. I timed it perfectly so that I could vote in the primaries for Charles Booker (I was still legally a Kentucky resident after all). I knew how important the concept behind his senate campaign was: “From the hood to the holler.” It had echoes of Fred Hampton’s rainbow coalition, which put cross-racial organizing against state power into praxis, and of which Kentucky and its working-class coal miners had once been a part. As people rushed into the fairgrounds convention center to vote, other Louisvillians gathered in Jefferson Square Park. Every evening that summer, the streets were filled with smoke, flash bangs, and tear gas, not just over the murder of George Floyd but also over the murder of one of our own by Louisville police: Breonna Taylor.
More Louisvillians would be shot in the aftermath of Breonna’s death: seven protestors were mysteriously shot during marches on May 29; David “YaYa” McAtee was shot and killed on June 1 by the Kentucky Army National Guard in the door of his restaurant business in West Louisville, miles away from the protests; a photographer Tyler Gerth, godson of longtime Courier Journal columnist Joe Gerth was fatally shot in Jefferson Square Park on June 27, where he had been documenting the protests; and several protest leaders were harassed and killed in the aftermath of that summer—one of which is mentioned herein, in Alissa Vance’s poem “For Hamza ‘Travis’ Nagdy,” who was shot and killed on Nov. 23.
In Louisville—the fourth most segregated city in the country after Detroit, Milwaukee, and Cleveland—Taylor’s murder reflected the reckless and hasty disregard for Black life by city officials, especially when those lives were connected in any way to the West end, Black Louisville. And disregard for Black life is often a socioeconomic barometer of the disregard for other marginalized populations.
Before I left Louisville on my way to Texas, I went down to Jefferson Square Park to talk to protestors and to see the graffitied King Louis statue, a photo of which had been sent to me by my friend Chad Golden a few nights before. But this small, condemned statue of the far-removed French monarchy didn’t feel as impactful as it had in Richmond. The source of power was more obscure, decentralized than Confederate symbols of recent historical trauma. Kentucky was, after all, a slave-holding Union state, and Louisville was on a bondsman lease rather than plantation system—an even more peculiar version of “the Peculiar Institution.” In that moment—as I stood looking up at this diminutive, handless statue of a king—felt like Louisvillians still had so much more to say. And this time, city and state officials were not vocally supportive of the protestors and their demands. They were responding with more murder, more power, more silence.
I left Louisville unsure of how to be useful. By the time I got settled in Houston, my phone was blowing up. Writers were calling me, sending emails and poems, and the damning affidavits in the Breonna Taylor case. They were telling a story about an intentionally corrupt, unchecked police department and life in the shadow of the spires—those twin symbols of our world-famous racing track, which seemed like the only thing that mattered to our city leaders sometimes, which often seemed to be made more important than our lives.
Even though I had—for the past five years—been like a balloon floating away, I had tried to stay in touch with my city as much as possible. At the same time, I was ascending further and further in my career and my book was coming out in a couple months—my first book, Horsepower, which read like an elegy for the city, and a love letter, all at once. I had a platform now. What could I do with it? How could I be useful from 14 hours away?
In July, I taught a Sarabande-sponsored workshop for Louisville writers called “Against Silence: Writing Our Current National Moment.” Out of that workshop came poems included in this anthology by Rheonna Nicole, Glenna Meeks, Mackenzie Berry, David Haydon, and Uyên Nguyen. Yet, I knew there were still so many more poets who had something to say about what was happening in our city, about who we were, and about the history of this place. Writers who wanted an opportunity to speak about the experiences they had growing up in Louisville, in the shadow of industry and tourism, but never had the formal literary spaces in which to share. Writers of color and working-class writers, from underserved communities like the West end and South Louisville, who felt left out or unaware of recent calls for artists grants or literary journal submissions just as their communities entered the national consciousness as yet another epicenter of police brutality, food injustice, gentrification, and the gamut of institutional problems that usually follow.
How could I use my platform to collect those poets, which included me, and bring us out from the periphery of the city’s tourism and into its center? How could we penetrate the silence and insidious gentility of our city’s elite?
Back in Houston, it was 100 degrees and little lizards called “anoles” slithered across the sidewalks in masses. They were sometimes the only sign of life I saw for days in the summer of 2020. I tried not to step on them and crush them under my giant foot on my long walks with Luna. Writing had led me into a space of complete isolation even though it had begun as my attempt to connect. I looked forward to the few hours on Tuesdays and Saturdays that I would spend with the Louisville poets over Zoom, trying to put language to what was happening, trying to name the unique, insulated, stasis of our city, which often felt like The Sunken Place.
“Once a city said / How do we operationalize compassion? before firing 20 bullets into a couple’s bed,” Mackenzie Berry wrote in a poem she brought into workshop (herein titled, “In Which an Entrepreneur is the Mayor”). And in the precise language of her poem, she diagnosed a previously ineffable injustice we felt at the discrepancy between Mayor Greg Fischer’s campaign rhetoric and his rhetoric around the murder of Breonna Taylor, between what was happening on the streets and what was being said in press conferences and left off on affidavits. It was irreconcilable. It made us feel insane. It drove some of us to insane acts. I realized that sharing our poetry with one another over the course of that workshop and naming these old and new injustices was an antidote to institutional gaslighting and its effects on us. I realized through poems we affirmed one another’s experiences. I realized that only the poets’ report could tell the truth about our city.
Kentucky is a state steeped in literary tradition, a tradition that rivals its bourbon, its horseracing, and its basketball. A tradition that boasts Robert Penn Warren—who twice won the Pulitzer and was one of the founders of New Criticism, the school of poetics responsible for how we read and teach poems today—as well as the late bell hooks, Muhammad Ali, and Hunter S. Thompson. However, there is a writing tradition particular to Louisville that has gone unnoticed. My curation here reflects that tradition, bringing together several writing communities that I have been a part of or shared space with over the years, including but not limited to West Louisville poets, Affrilachian Poets, Spalding, UofL, and literary MFA poets, and borne out of writing venues now shuttered such as Expressions and the Java House—managed by my cousins at their historic mansion in Portland from the 1980s through the early aughts. It was at the Java House that I read my first poems in public as an 11-year-old girl. It was at places like the Java House and Café Kilimanjaro that Black poets and thinkers such as Amiri Baraka, Dr. Francis Cress Welsing, and our current Kentucky Poet Laureate Crystal Wilkinson, came to read poems in Louisville in the early 1990s. It is my hope that we recover those poetic histories and communities in the poems that follow on Louisville’s traditions and icons, protests and places, spirits and songs, and portraits and memories.
—Joy PriestTable of Contents
In the Shadow of the Spires: A
Foreward
Traditions &
Icons
Bop: Ohio River/River City
Jean Rabin Gives
Africa The Bird
Directions to Colonel Sanders’ Grave
Ghost Signs, Flea Market
Ceremonial for The World Dainty Championship
My City Saw
the First Black Athlete Millionaire, Jockey Isaac Murphy, and Afterward the
Winning Jockeys Were White
Louisville is Also the #1 Producer of Disco
Balls in the World (Home to the Last Disco Ball Maker)
Hot Brown
Derby
Dennis Cooper Racing Stables
Our Derby
An Ode to
South Louisville
Westend New Year
Replaced
Place & Protest
We
Were Here
In Which an Entrepreneur is the Mayor
State of Denial
Denial
is a Cliff We Are Driven Over
witch-auk & me stop over in my
hometown
The Reckoning
Community
Battleground State, or In an interview with Dawn
Gee, Mayor Greg Fischer says his hands are tied regarding the murder of Breonna
Taylor
On Finding a Crisp Apple in Louisville’s West End
Al
Green Was a Preacher
Rubbertown
Recycling Neighborhoods
Iroquois
Park
My South End
Neighbors
As Preston Street Moves South to Highway
east
broadway, or on catching TARC (transit authority of river city) uptown
Spirit
& Song
fleur-de-lis
After
Everyone Is Gone
The Past Doesn’t Burst into Song Like It Used
To
Drunk and Longing in Louisville
NEW MOON TO-DO LIST, OR,
I LEFT MY BEST SEASON IN LOUISVILLE
STEAD
February 15th
Ceramic Jesus
Winning Colors, 1988
Midnight
at the Quarterpole Bar and Lounge
One Year Sober
Southern Drawl
I Will Tell You What Joy Is
For Hamza “Travis” Nagdy
The
Way Out Is the Way Through
from STROLL
from STROLL
Portrait
& Memory
Frail
Where There is Smoke
Ode to Kentucky
Sport of Kings
When
the Wind Came
Abecedarian for Alzheimer’s
Heritage
Growing
Hands
Kentucky,
September
Years
I’ve Slept Right Through
The Milk Hours
Off Dwight Road
Double
Aortic Arch
Autobiography
When My Sister Told Me to Let Her Alone
Roses In the Eyes,
Oblivious To The Thorns
BUCK-SHOT
Owensboro, Kentucky, Late
Last June