Poetry. Los Angeles is known to be the most photographed city in the world, and its deep connection to the movie industry means that it is frequently mistaken for someplace else. Through gesture and image, BIRDS OF LOS ANGELES is a modern, metaphysical exploration of the way Southern California's rich cultural and environmental landscapes are misperceived.

Birds of Los Angeles

Literature & Fiction

Walters, Wendy S.

Poetry

Palm Press

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

Troy, Michigan

Futurepoem Books

In the manner of Calvino's Invisible Cities, Wendy S. Walters's essays deftly explore the psyches of cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, Portsmouth, and Washington, D.C. In "Cleveland," she interviews an African-American playwright who draws great reviews, but can't muster an audience. An on-air telephone chat between a DJ and his listeners drives a discussion of race and nutrition in "Chicago Radio." In "Manhattanville" the author, out for a walk with her biracial son, is mistaken for his nanny. Each essay explores societal questions—how eras of immense growth can leave us unable to prosper from that growth, how places intended for safety become fraught with danger, and how race and gender bias threaten our communities. Walters's haunting utterances are beautifully precise estimations of a place and its people.

Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal

Essays & Correspondence

Sarabande Books

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Books by Walters, Wendy S.