latest work

How to live​ in ruins

When Lee Chilcote and his wife Katherine bought a townhouse in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood of Cleveland in 2006, they explored the city – going to every new bar and restaurant, joining a rowing team on the Cuyahoga River, and volunteering with nonprofits and creating a giving circle.  
 
Then, two years later, the city became ground zero for the foreclosure crisis. Although they were luckier than most, their middle-class lives were threatened by the calamity of the 2008 recession. The couple’s home value went down by a third right around the time their first child was born.  
 
Yet they knew they wanted to raise their family in an urban environment. As parents, they faced a decision: should they stay or should they go? After looking at homes in Shaker Heights, where many of their friends were moving, they decided to hunker down through the worst of the recession.
 
They moved into a newly renovated four-bedroom home in Detroit Shoreway that had previously been a bank-owned foreclosure. Now more likely to be pushing a stroller to the playground than walking to the bar, they soon shared playdates with other parents and built an even stronger bond with the community. Living in a diverse neighborhood also meant being confronted by the tough issues of poverty, inequality and gentrification, from the area’s homeless population to the crumbling local schools.
 
The poems in How to Live in Ruins tell one couple’s story of moving into Cleveland and deciding to raise a family there. This is a book for anyone who has ever loved a place that’s a little bit rusty and tried to make it better.
 
"Brings Cleveland in all its rough beauty, its poetry of ruins, to vivid, hardscrabble life." -- George Bilgere 

"A beautifully crafted homage to Cleveland; one that manages to embrace the complications of both parenthood and urban living." -- Kelly Fordon

Available at Visible Voice, Mac's Backs, Loganberry Books, The Learned Owl, Fireside Bookshop, Appletree and more. Also available on Amazon here.

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PRAISE FOR How to live in ruins

​What parents, saddled (however joyously!) with children can read these lines from Lee Chilcote’s poem, “Before Kids, We Owned the City” and not recognize themselves:
 
Now we walk past the bars
on the way to the playground.
Now the jars of pasta sauce tremble
when they see us coming,
kids packed into the grocery cart,
waving their arms like drunken crane operators…

This is one of many ruefully funny, knowing looks at parenthood that counter the lyrical solemnity of these brooding meditations on Cleveland. How to Live in Ruins, haunted by the ghosts of Harvey Pekar, Tamir Rice, and Chilcote’s own boyhood self, brings Cleveland in all its rough beauty, its poetry of ruins, to vivid, hardscrabble life.  These poems will be as familiar to Clevelanders as lake effect snow, the anguish of a Browns fan, or bridges rusting above the Cuyahoga.

-- George Bilgere, author of Blood Pages and Imperial

Every city needs its bards--poets who want to sing their life and the life of their city in the same songs. Cleveland has had Hart Crane, Russell Atkins, d.a. levy, Alberta Turner, George Bilgere, Ray McNiece, and Mary Weems, among others. Add Lee Chilcote to the list, for his daily witness of our rough city, a "patch of blight to call home" that seems both ruin and revelation. In Chilcote's poems, which alternate between bemusing and poignant, "the city presses its tongue in your mouth." He helps me see this complicated city again. 

-- Philip Metres, author of Pictures at an Exhibition and Sand Opera

​Lee Chilcote has written a beautifully crafted homage to Cleveland; one that manages to embrace the complications of both parenthood and urban living. Far from reverential, these poems are tributes nevertheless--suffused with a dark humor, clarity, and empathy that overrides the sometimes knotty reality of life in the Rust Belt.

-- Kelly Fordon, author of Garden for the Blind

additional works

THE SHAPE OF HOME

Lee Chilcote's debut chapbook of poems is about finding your voice, creating something new out of the old, and nurturing a family, a marriage and a creative life in a post-recession era.

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Purchase a copy today!

A Race Anthology: Dispatches and Artifacts from a Segregated City

In collaboration with the City Club, this gathers “dispatches” from our region and across the nation to discuss the history and the current manifestations of segregation in Cleveland. This Anthology combines essays, comics, and poetry with transcripts from The City Club’s tremendous archives to give a glimpse into a dynamic that affects us all. Lee Chilcote’s essay “Roxboro” appears in the anthology.

Cleveland Neighborhood Guidebook

Belt published a new Cleveland guidebook in 2016. Lee Chilcote’s essay on Detroit Shoreway, “Pretty Gritty: Living off Lorain,” appears in the collection.

Rust Belt Chic:
​The Cleveland AnthologY

Chilcote’s essay “The Long Slow Walk of Detroit Shoreway” appears in this collection, now in its second edition.

PRAISE FOR THE SHAPE OF HOME

This is the poet-as-father-homemaker-musician, who is late to parties, argues about the greatest guitarist of all time, and is left awestruck at the sight of his own father because “Protestants have fathers who / only appear at night.” If the Midwest has a certain tone of voice and subject — as a place that is somehow always the present abruptly set amid the rusty ruins of the past — then this is what Chilcote captures so triumphantly against the din of music, the cloud of booze, the scramble of children, and the presence of Love, who, as in his poem “Caveat Emptor,” is “the architect who shrugs his shoulders.” A delightful, intimate, and thoroughly noteworthy debut.

— Brad Ricca, author of American Mastodon, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award

Lee Chilcote is not interested in a vapid beauty that smooths over invisible barriers and difficult loves. The clamor of the world makes itself heard in his poems. His “muses are sirens, trains, barking dogs.” The Shape of Home curves lovingly around children that spring up “like sunflowers,” but these poems report as well on the black thread that runs through desires and dreams.

— Susan Grimm, author of Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue and other books

​The Shape of a Home is a debut collection of poems that are as refreshingly honest as they are tender, witty, and compassionate.  Lee Chilcote is clearly a welcome new voice to American poetry. 

— Nin Andrews, author of Why God Is a Woman and other books