Winner of the 2019 Minnesota Book Award, GENTRY!FICATION: OR THE SCENE OF THE CRIME is a labyrinth full of folk tale and sign, definitions and the black subjects who violate them. In a time where many cities across the nation are undergoing massive shifts in who peoples them, particularly in sites once considered abandoned and without value, this book is weapon of memory a stew of din meant to haunt shallow notions of what has remained or been allowed to remain in geographies. This book will stay with you.
Chaun Webster is a poet and graphic designer living in Minneapolis whose work is attempting to put pressure on the spatial and temporal limitations of writing, of the english language, as a way to demonstrate its incapacity for describing blackness outside of a regime of death and dying. Webster's debut book, Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime, was published by Noemi Press in 2018, and received the 2019 Minnesota Book Award for poetry.
"With consciousness and verve, deft wordplay and striking design, GeNtry!fication: or the scene of the crime offers epic, testimony, and premonition. Pinpointing and pulsating North Minneapolis, this book reframes a site of black imagination and resistance. Here, on the corner of Penn & Lowry, Chaun Webster hobnobs with Lorde, Davis, Smith, and Wells-Barnett, not to mention Baraka, Brathwaite, Rankine, and Ligon. Here, too, the maroon prophet child runs through with quantum feet reminding us to rant against trouble. Like your rent and the North Star, this book is what's up!" - Gabrielle Civil
"Check this discourse of trouble. You must immediately read this radical work of black refusal and black manifest/station. Chaun Webster is doing the subterranean cartographer's work of spatializing a people's topographies of resistance and insistence. Here in the sundown town that is the entire black diaspora-united states-north Minneapolis, Webster addresses the signs and signifiers of the collision of black bodies mapped onto the white imagination's terrorism as geography. Here is din in high contrast. Here is the runaway notice as city neighborhood, as body, as il/legibility, as a ticket to exile and railroad and high-voltage language lightning strike. A kind of symphony to collective memory and (a) map/s of liberation/s passed through the glittery cosmos of black minds, as if black consciousness were always the dark, gorgeous volta, always on the move, slippery when turning our attention back onto the scene of the crime of relentless white colonial violence over black space and the body of the black citizen. Flight, fight." - Sun Yung Shin
"Were I to ride the number 19 bus through North Minneapolis, there is no one else I'd rather run into than the runaway-trickster-poet, Chaun Webster. If this book doesn't make you nervous, then step back and put your ear to the ground– listen to 'what lay between and around the subject,' in that forbiDIN space, at the corners of Lowry and Penn. Along these streets lies this book, a series of rogue communiqués for those deemed 'out of place' and in need of an insurrectionary survival text." - Lara Mimosa Montes
"Chaun Webster provides not only liner notes, but typography itself for some TYPE of riot. Not just the sound of breaking it down, but also the look of what language has done and what we must do to it if we would free/face/find truth or possibility anywhere here (in ourselves and each other.) This is a text for saying, showing and studying, steeped in the scariest and most necessary black radical thought of our times. Run towards reading this, read this on the run, run with this and run on." - Alexis Pauline Gumbs
