Once attention is drawn to “the establishment of the horizontal axis”, social life has taken a turn toward a material, critically torqued political ethnography that documents the disillusion of space, as is the ongoing situation when two dear friends, deeply rooted in Cincinnati get together and exert pressure on the totalizing gentrification of a neighborhood called Over-the-Rhine. Do you understand the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest when an entire eco-social system is at stake?—Tyrone Williams and Patrick Clifford hold multiple angles of inquiry simultaneously as the urban environment transforms around and within them. A maniacal and drastic repetition is at hand. “Trouble brought trouble” as a crisis of hyper monetization that captivates presence, when (time and again) neo-colonial jurisdiction initiates a “curricularized” displacement of displaced people, contemporizing segregation. A palimpsest of architected municipal design passed down from the Age of Reason to the Anthropocene. This “involved elegy” builds strength, vulnerability, intimacy and care. Washpark is an intense and complexly nuanced collaborative intervention that disabuses us of the notion of progress and other manufactured deceptions in our civic sphere.

-Brenda Iijima

Washpark is 48 pages. Year 2021.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Pat Clifford is a community practice social worker based in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he has served as a community leader, activist and consultant in areas of community collaboration and social change. He worked at the Drop Inn Center shelter (formerly across the street from Washington Park) for over twenty years. Clifford’s poems and essays can be found online at Kaurab, Jacket2, PennSound, and The MUD Proposal. His ongoing collaboration with Aryanil Mukherjee has produced the books Chaturangik/SQUARES (CinnamonTeal, 2009) and The Memorandum/MOU (Kaurab, 2011).

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of six books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press, 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press, 2011), Howell (Atelos Books, 2011) and Az iZ (Omnidawn, 2018). He is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently the companion works Between Red and Green: The Black Brigade of Cincinnati (Dos Madres Press, 2016) and Red Between Green (Portable Labs at Yo-Yo Press, 2015).