Electric Arches

Black History Month

Staff recommendations, guest essays, and curated reading lists.

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose.

Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing’s narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances — blues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects — hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook — as precious icons.

Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant — a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher’s angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.

"Ewing writes trenchantly and tenderly....Her language is conversational, her verse lulling the reader into territory that feels immediately familiar, even when it isn't." The Paris Review

"The spirit of this collection soars...Electric Arches is well worth your time. The writing here will make you think and feel and grow." Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

"While reading, I found myself continually thinking, ‘I had no idea you could make poetry do that,’ followed by, ‘Thank God she has done this’." National Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, artist, and educator from Chicago. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, New Republic, The Nation, The Atlantic, and many other publications. She is a sociologist at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.