“The Rockford Anthology” by Rachel León

While book reviews often try to answer the question of if a book is worth buying, for a book like “The Rockford Anthology,” edited by Rachel León, the question is sharpened to the edge of “Why should I care about an anthology of essays about Rockford, Illinois, of all places?” Even from the perspective of Chicago, Rockford is the periphery, a place driven past or to be mentioned as if it were a suburb, such as when it was name-checked in the first episode of “The Bear.” Rockford is the kind of place that flyover country treats as flyover, so why should readers visit it now?

The question about caring enough about Rockford to read about it is not too dissimilar to the question the anthology has about the Forest City itself. Rockford’s residents, captured here as a chorus that is as diverse in age, race, class and sexuality as you’d expect in a major city, understand the city’s reputation. The Screw Capital of the World and Illinois’ former second-largest city is frequently referred to as “a pitstop to somewhere greater,” a place where “success means leaving,” and where people move from to places “more exotic: Portland, New York City, Seattle, Naperville.” It is a reputation that stretches back to its original founding under the name “Midway,” acknowledging that it was the middle stop between Chicago and a more desired destination. It is a place to be left, sure, but as many authors argue here, it is also a place to live.

The anthology’s diverse slice of voices provides evidence that Rockford is not only a place where life can happen, but where it can be fought for. There are sections of the anthology about how the city is a frontline for struggles for racial justice and equity in education. We also meet entrepreneurs and artists of various kinds. There are plenty of writers naturally, but we are even treated to a depiction of a Sisyphean effort to perform opera.

There is also the force of language used to defend the city that I find particularly strong here. Voltavelle’s poem “Portrait of the American Dream on Fire” reminds us that even in the madness of industrial decline, “the virtue of the flatlands is a bigger sky for dreaming.” Another particularly fun use of language here is Ashley Ray-Harris’ essay “I want to get an 815 Tattoo,” which not only reminds us Chicagoans that Rockford isn’t a suburb (“We have our own suburbs, we don’t need yours”), but also confronts the words of Carl Sandburg to mock the notion that the city’s value is only its “exact proximity from that city with too much on its shoulders anyway.”

As a story of the small city looking out toward a bigger one, there is a sneer pointed toward Chicago. But I feel like not returning the sneer myself. We Chicagoans can find much truth in the struggles of our northwesterly cousins, especially when it comes to life as an artist. I too have once fallen into the trap of an idea that “literary lives are lived elsewhere,” and that success meant New York, and that anywhere else meant failure. But life in the Second City can have as much meaning and truth as it does in a coastal one. If we are to defend our own proud city, then it is our responsibility not to sneer at the lives lived in Rockford, ones as vibrant and painful as ours. While “The Rockford Anthology” hasn’t convinced me to move there, it has instilled in me a respect that the city deserves.

“The Rockford Anthology”
By Rachel León
Belt Publishing, 304 pages