Sign-In
Cart
808s on Halsted: Poems from Englewood
Paperback
Publisher: Charlotte Ava Thomas
Published: Jul 8 2026
Pages: 148
Weight: 0.46
Height: 0.32 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
808s on Halsted: Poems from Englewood is a debut poetry collection that moves through South Side Chicago the way music moves through brick walls - before you hear it, you feel it.
In six chapters, the collection traces a life shaped by sound: grandmother's choir robe pressed on Tuesday nights, JBL speakers carried up two flights like something sacred, the bass from a passing car that opened something in a seven-year-old chest that never closed back up. From the gospel of Anita Baker on Saturday mornings to the drill era that sent Chicago's grief around the world, these forty-eight poems refuse to separate joy from sorrow, faith from violence, or the personal from the political.
This is not an elegy for Englewood. It is a signal - sent out with the faith that whoever needs it will receive it.
Chapters include:
- Before the Beat - family, church, first sounds, grandmother's records
- Block Music - 63rd Street, corner stores, summer, community DJs
- The Gospel and the Gunshots - faith and violence held in the same breath
- Rap Raised Us - hip-hop, drill, the algorithm, and the price of visibility
- Songs My Mother Played - R&B, womanhood, and inherited memory
- Tomorrow's Playlist - legacy, return, and hard-won hope
The music was always there. We just had to learn, again, how to listen.
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Agee, Joel
Musil, Robert
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Paperback