The Possible City: Exercises in Dreaming Philadelphia
Nathaniel Popkin is a visionary with two feet on the ground, a poet who finds verse in the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary. In these elegantly crafted essays, Popkin imagines a future animated by the city s rich past and grounded in its troubled but still beautiful present. To spend time in Popkin s Philadelphia is to see the city anew. --Thomas J. Sugrue, Kahn Professor of History and Sociology, University of PennsylvaniaTo know a city is to walk it through...with loving heart. To dream a city is to tangle and to juxtapose, to yield to heroics and romance. Nathaniel Popkin knows, he dreams, and with profoundly beautiful, often surprising prose, he suggests a whole and hallowed Philadelphia. --Beth Kephart, author of Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia s Schuylkill River[In this] lovely book Popkin has written an evocative and provocative portrait of a great but flawed city. It is defiant and fierce and filled with the power and potential of urban life. It should be read by anyone who loves cities and dreams of making them better. --Richard C. Schragger, Professor of Law, University of Virginia