Troy, Michigan

Troy, Michigan

Poetry. African American Studies. "If to imagine the city is to imagine the human psyche, as it is in Italo Calvino's <em>Invisible Cities</em>, 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