Homes In The Heartland

Originally published: Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

Originally published: Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

Urban poverty, along with all of its poignant manifestations, is moving from city centers to working-class and industrial suburbs in contemporary America. Nowhere is this more evident than in East St. Louis, Illinois. Once a thriving manufacturing and transportation center, East St. Louis is now known for its unemployment, crime, and collapsing infrastructure. Abandoned in the Heartland takes us into the lives of East St. Louis’s predominantly African American residents to find out what has happened since industry abandoned the city, and jobs, quality schools, and city services disappeared, leaving people isolated and imperiled. Jennifer Hamer introduces men who search for meaning and opportunity in dead-end jobs, women who often take on caretaking responsibilities until well into old age, and parents who have the impossible task of protecting their children in this dangerous, and literally toxic, environment. Illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs showing how the city has changed over time, this book, full of stories of courage and fortitude, offers a powerful vision of the transformed circumstances of life in one American suburb.

Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior: HOMES. Moheb Soliman traces the coasts of the Great Lakes region with poems, exploring the nature of belonging in relation to land and the formation of identity along borders. Moheb Soliman's HOMES maps the shoreline of the Great Lakes from the rocky cliffs of Duluth, Minnesota, to the spray of Niagara Falls and back again. This poetic travelogue offers an intimate perspective on an immigrant experience as Soliman drives his Corolla past exquisite vistas and abandoned mines, through tourist towns and midwestern suburbs, searching for a place to claim as home. Against the backdrop of environmental destruction and a history of colonial oppression, the vitality of Soliman's language brings a bold ecopoetic lens to bear on the relationship between transience and belonging in the world's largest, most porous borderland.