Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate
knowledge of Chicago with a poet's eye, and capture what it's really
like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of
human experience--a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue,
the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a
North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare,
and much more--these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald
Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city
life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of
Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren
and Carl Sandburg.
Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense
proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a
store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western
Avenue, and from a child's piggybank to nature in urban spaces. For
Gibbons, the city's people, places, and historical reverberations are a
compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty
and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of
its most prominent writers, Slow Trains Overhead evokes and
commemorates human life in a great city.
