Each Chartered Street

Sebastian Agudelo’s second book engages a documentary poetics to dissect an inner city neighborhood and explore the social, political, and economic tensions and affinities as well as search for the humanness of living together. The book is bracketed by an introductory section that looks to the past to contextualize and complicate the contemporary questions, and a closing section that looks to the future for a more global and environmental definition of what a neighbor might be. As Daisy Fried writes, Each Chartered Street is a complicated, wonderful, humanist book about urban life and urban characters, novelistic in its reach, intricate in its lingo, literary in its references, and alive to the troubled streets of Philadelphia. Do put it on your list.