New Books In Literature

Every time I fly into Chicago at night, I’m amazed by the grid I see out of the portal: those hundreds of thousands of almost identical lots, 25 by 125 feet, that are made visible by the city’s 250,000-odd street lights, block after block, all sprawling westward out of the darkness of Lake Michigan like a dream of Euclidian order. I’m amazed because it’s so unnatural, so not the way we make sense of the places where we live our everyday lives. The grid is the living image of an abstract ideal: that a place can be quantified, cut up, understood, and settled. The truth is very different, especially in a city like Chicago. Places are wild. Their pasts rear up and reveal themselves; their foundations give way. In all their layered complexity, contradiction, and intractability, places are about as quantifiable as people, a fact Barrie Jean Borich makes explicit in her new book, Body Geographic (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Borich sets out to map not only the city of Chicago and the