Kevin Coval’s poetry has always focused on the margins of identity and community. Tackling subjects like his Jewish upbringing and structural racism, the self-styled breakbeat poet has drawn inspiration from working-class Chicagoans and people of color whose stories were not often told.
Coval had been wanting to write a book about Wicker Park for a long time, but it wasn’t until artist Langston Allston came into the picture that the idea became a reality. The two met at Allston’s 2017 show, “When People Could Fly,” on the history of Chicago public housing. Allston’s work had a “realism that hinted at a comic book love,” Coval says.
For them, there’s a “constant threat of removal,” Coval says. And when that happens, “you have an erasure of working-class people and stories in the city.”
Even as the neighborhood has become almost unrecognizable to longtime residents, you can still see some vestiges of old Wicker Park, Coval says. Many of the dive bars are still intact, for example. And Sharkula still slings mixtapes on Milwaukee Avenue more than 20 years later.
