“You know about the Jones having more than you have got? Well, every time you used to get something, they would take it.”

|detroit geographical expedition and institute

Initiated by humanist geographer William Bunge, the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI) was a radical collaboration from 1968-1971 between geographers, educators and young black activists. Formed in the wake of the 1967 rebellion, the Vietnam War and widespread deindustrialization, the DGEI mapped the lives of Detroiters, especially poor African Americans. By rendering inequality visible, these human geographers created social change and influenced public policy. The DGEI asked important and often poignant questions about community life, from the number and kind of children’s playgrounds to why “rat-bite regions” were concentrated in black neighborhoods.

Inspired by DGEI maps, field notes and interviews, this series of poems is concerned with family and neighborhood life in late twentieth-century Detroit. Together, they ask questions from the past that still resonate today: How do families survive hardship? How can we — black, white, Asian, Arab, all of us — live together? What will make our community whole?

The DGEI poems evolve from interests that recur in my poems: how larger forces, such as racism, segregation or poverty, influence and infuse the more intimate spaces of family, personal relationships and community life. Simply put: I tell stories about the people and streets that raised me and about the most vulnerable among us, wherever they are.

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DGEI map: Detroitography. “You know about the Jones…?” is a quote from Gwendolyn Warren, a Detroit native who worked with the DGEI as a teenager. Revised excerpt from the poem, “Where Commuters Run Over Black Children, 1971.”