BOOKS

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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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