Troy, Michigan

Poetry. African American Studies. "If to imagine the city is to imagine the human psyche, as it is in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, then Wendy S. Walters's TROY, MICHIGAN approximates a psyche flattened by middle class desires, racist anxieties, and inexplicably terrifying violence. Walters's quiet, haunting utterances are beautifully precise mappings of the measure of a city's weight and thereby its dark (or darkened) soul. In the wake of reading, I am reminded of Kipling's refrain, 'Lest we forget'—a warning, a kind of boogeyman emergent from a landscape's shiny surface. Walters's TROY, MICHIGAN simply could not be better."—Dawn Lundy Martin