American Ghost: Poets on Life After Industry (Witness Post)

Poetry. Photography. African American Studies. Native American Studies. Poets and photographers reflect on the real costs of deindustrialization—community life, personal identity, cultural traditions, and the natural world—in manufacturing cities and their rural counterparts in Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. Battered by unprecedented joblessness, poverty, and depopulation, these communities are often seen as ghost towns, phantoms of a former glory, but in doing so we fail to acknowledge the people who fare the downturns and form the core of America's urban and rural cultures. This intimate collection culls inspiration from individual and collective experience, found text, and oral history as it speaks to the humanity surviving amid so-called ruin. AMERICAN GHOST asks: How will we sustain each other? The collection includes poems and photographs by b: william bearhart, Suzette Bishop, Anne Gorrick, Randall Horton, Denise Miller, Ruby Murray, Kate Schapira, Lillien Waller, Valaurian Waller, and Deborah Woodard.