Culture
Poems That Show How Gentrification Is Personal
To close out National Poetry Month, we rounded up poems that translate gentrification and the housing crisis into personal terms.
Terms like “gentrification” and “housing crisis” get tossed around so much that they’re often stripped of their human context, framed as abstract, hypothetical, and overwhelming concepts. Good poetry can take what is unwieldy and make it specific and human, showing viscerally how policy and development translate to everyday lives. As National Poetry Month comes to a close, here are a few poems that capture the physical and emotional consequences of urban transformation. (Be sure to also check out this collection of favorite poems from The Atlantic and CityLab staff, too.)
“Dispatches From The Black Barbershop, Tony’s Chair. 2011,” Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, Sidekick Lit