Detroit: Workers, Teachers, Lovers by William T. Langford IV ***Ritzenhein Emerging Poet Award Winner***

In this bluesy ode to Detroit and its working-class people, William T. Langford IV has crafted a deeply thorough spirit of communal uplift. These poems resonate with “the gospel-growl” of those who still boom and brim within. But this book also demands a worthier way forward by reckoning with a city’s history of loss and abandonment. Fueled by his gifts of lyricism, musicality, and imagination, Langford ignites and warms a future harmony for Detroit that reflects “the dreamwork/ of divergent minds/ in concert.”

–Geffrey Davis, Author or Night Angler

“Will’s work builds the type of communities I want to belong to, where everyone is welcomed, held accountable, and celebrated. His poems are the invitation,  the tools, and the blueprints.”

–Thomas Budday

Langford’s work is a heartwarming tribute to place, culture, and resilience, through the lens of family, school spirit, and love. A celebration of what it means to be proud of where you come from and where you choose to be. As well as a celebration of the musicality of language.

—Sarah Blake, Author of Naamah, Mr. West 

In William Langford‘s Detroit: Workers, Teachers, Lovers, you’ll find prayer and praise; reckoning and response cry: “Oh steel city,/oil slick,/slipping/from me./City I left./Oh steel city.” Detroit hums in these pages like cool jazz, like Motown Sound, like a layered and loving relationship between son and father—a son and father bearing “the same stitched scar/on different arms.” I adored this collection, pulling up a chair for city delicacies like “meat and sweet shops,. . .mango, supple melon for the yuppies,/. . .free hymnal books/dispensed like soup rations.” Langford demonstrates he is a master poet of place, elevating his city through every carefully-chosen image so that readers are handed a Coney Dog “with yellow onion’s ghost white insides,/granules strewn like salt on an icy walk.” William Langford has a heart here as big as Detroit, spilling out into both sonnet and story. This is a stunning debut collection, and William Langford is a poet to watch.

–Janine Certo, author of Elixir, winner of the New American Poetry Prize and the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize