Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit

Of this compilation, Meisel writes, "...you'll find me holding out a tender, if grave empathy for the denizens and the grand buildings and the overall, variable reputation of Detroit that, while always so very large in historical grandeur, fails, somehow, to be held up in protection, tenderness, significance and priority by those who have historically held power to do so. Many of the poems - culled from seven books dating from 2002 through 2018 - are heart-burned elegies for the destroyed, disenfranchised, de-industrialized individuals caught up in the crazed socio-cultural psychology that gripped Detroit by the shirt collar (through racism, through political greed and hubris and a hyper-masculine ethos) and then, leveled it. Some of these poems are grave and severe, some more emotive lamentations, some are spliced with slang to get the message across and some of the poems are just prayerful incantations meant to assuage the pain and heal the wounds so prevalent here...Empty landscapes, forgotten factories, burned hotels, mattress communities, torched houses and bulldozed churches - these are the expressed voice of a deindustrialized landscape. Folks looking out from hollow eyes at the camera - these are the wayfarers still staking a fruitless claim. Fruitless, because they are seemingly irrelevant any more; they seem forgettable - especially in the shining specter of a newer, improved progress. A commercialized façade of new change...The past cannot be erased as forgettable. Not for us. We are not a- historical. Departure returns as spacious echo. To write of it - as I have here - is to receive the echo and then to reconcile it as veritable voice. The veritable voice then, as a tribal council for the establishment of new treaties - treaties between the past and the present - that will serve to improve and to moralize, with a deeper compassion, all true growth and progress. A progress that does not ignore what made it. "