Detroit Detroit

Author: Anna Vitale

Publisher: Roof Books (2017)

Before the financial collapse thrust Detroit into the limelight, there were kids in the city making up dance routines, listening to the radio, and navigating the rugged terrain of racism, poverty, and sexism. Detroit Detroit is Anna Vitale's timely debut about the city that raised her, a city that is impossible to sum up and hard not to love.

"Detroit Detroit is a poet's psyche held in the mirrored city of memoir, of childhood and adolescence inflected by and inflicted with a multi- dimensional experience of race and the givens of 'what we see in our mind and what we feel in our body and how scary that confusion can be.' And as significantly, it is a thought piece on the longing to belong, when one remains ever close to yet separate from belonging. As mediated as Vitale's words are through the rap and popular music that serve as both guide and interpreter of the incoherence of raced experience, this is a searingly personal work. It insists on the particularity of experience invoked in dream, wish, confession, statement, lyric and anti- lyric—and through which music weaves its blurry truths."

–Carla Harryman