808s on Halsted

808s on Halsted: Poems from Englewood is a debut poetry collection that moves through South Side Chicago the way music moves through brick walls - before you hear it, you feel it.

In six chapters, the collection traces a life shaped by sound: grandmother's choir robe pressed on Tuesday nights, JBL speakers carried up two flights like something sacred, the bass from a passing car that opened something in a seven-year-old chest that never closed back up. From the gospel of Anita Baker on Saturday mornings to the drill era that sent Chicago's grief around the world, these forty-eight poems refuse to separate joy from sorrow, faith from violence, or the personal from the political.

This is not an elegy for Englewood. It is a signal - sent out with the faith that whoever needs it will receive it.

Chapters include:

• Before the Beat - family, church, first sounds, grandmother's records
• Block Music - 63rd Street, corner stores, summer, community DJs
• The Gospel and the Gunshots - faith and violence held in the same breath
• Rap Raised Us - hip-hop, drill, the algorithm, and the price of visibility
• Songs My Mother Played - R&B, womanhood, and inherited memory
• Tomorrow's Playlist - legacy, return, and hard-won hope

"The music was always there. We just had to learn, again, how to listen."