Detroit

<p class=ql-align-justify>In this bluesy ode to Detroit and its working-class people William T. Langford IV has crafted a deeply thorough spirit of communal uplift. These poems resonate with the gospel-growl of those who still boom and brim within. But this book also demands a worthier way forward by reckoning with a city's history of loss and abandonment. Fueled by his gifts of lyricism musicality and imagination Langford ignites and warms a future harmony for Detroit that reflects the dreamwork/ of divergent minds/ in concert.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Geffrey Davis</strong> Author or <em>Night Angler</em></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Will's work builds the type of communities I want to belong to where everyone is welcomed held accountable and celebrated. His poems are the invitation the tools and the blueprints.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Thomas Budday</strong> Educator Community Organizer</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Langford's work is a heartwarming tribute to place culture and resilience through the lens of family school spirit and love. A celebration of what it means to be proud of where you come from and where you choose to be. As well as a celebration of the musicality of language.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Sarah Blake</strong> Author of <em>Naamah Mr. West </em></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>In William Langford's <em>Detroit: Workers Teachers Lovers</em> you'll find prayer and praise; reckoning and response cry: Oh steel city/oil slick/slipping/from me./City I left./Oh steel city. Detroit hums in these pages like cool jazz like Motown Sound like a layered and loving relationship between son and father-a son and father bearing the same stitched scar/on different arms. I adored this collection pulling up a chair for city delicacies like meat and sweet shops. . .mango supple melon for the yuppies/. . .free hymnal books/dispensed like soup rations. Langford demonstrates he is a master poet of place elevating his city through every carefully-chosen image so that readers are handed a Coney Dog with yellow onion's ghost white insides/granules strewn like salt on an icy walk. William Langford has a heart here as big as Detroit spilling out into both sonnet and story. This is a stunning debut collection and William Langford is a poet to watch.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Janine Certo</strong> author of <em>Elixir</em> winner of the New American Poetry Prize and the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p><br></p>