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.