Print $12

Ecology of the Hood is a love letter to streets. It asks the question; What if the hood was not a collection of problems, but a complex ecosystem of living organisms, all mirroring the same survival against an inherently hostile world. The politics of environmentalism and Black Liberation collide with each other in cycles of extraction, survival, decay, and regeneration. This collection seeks to refute the idea that the rose growing from concrete is misplaced or forgotten. The gardens we grow belong here. They are proof of life in a world obsessed with our deaths.

Ecology of the Hood approaches the Black neighborhood as a lived environment shaped by policy, history, and inherited violence. The poems observe how bodies move through hunger, surveillance, and loss, and how homes, lakes, streets, animals, and weather carry the same pressures placed on the people who live among them. Family memory and local geography ground the work, with ancestors, domestic rituals, and sites of grief forming the emotional and political terrain of the collection.

Violence appears in water systems, housing, public space, and the ways Black lives are rendered ordinary in their disappearance. Personal grief unfolds alongside communal loss, revealing how neighborhoods are treated as expendable spaces rather than places worthy of care.

At its core, Ecology of the Hood is a study of persistence and knowledge passed through generations. The work honors how Black communities learn to live inside hostile conditions through care, memory, imagination, and ritual. What emerges is a record of endurance that insists on life, even when the environment is designed to deny it.