Barrie Jean Borich

Short nonfiction. From inside cover: " Slag Glass City is a magazine of essay arts, textual burlesque, and post-industrial forms. We are a creative nonfiction and multidisciplinary media journal engaged with sustainability, identity and art in urban environments..."

From page one of this publication: "Slag Glass City Miniatures are periodic compilations selected from the online journal Slag Glass City. This edition was created by students, faculty, and contributing editors at Chicago's DePaul University, as part of the M.A. in Writing & Publishing course The American Literary Magazine--Idealists and Happy fools. Slag Glass City is a magazine of essay arts, textual burlesque, and post-industrial forms. We are a creative nonfiction and multidisciplinary media journal engaged with sustainability, identity, and art in urban environments. The living city is broken and blooming. How will our roof gardens grow?"

Legend: My Body as the Middle West -- Map 1: Geographical Solutions : A map of the Middle West, with insets past and current -- Map 2: Alabaster City's Gleam : A body map of Chicago, with insets -- Map 3: American Doll : A map of Hong Kong imagined, with Avenue H insets -- Map 4: Mapping the Body Back : An overlay map, with pages illegible or missing -- Triptik: On a Clear Day, Catalina : Los Angeles itinerary, with overlooks and day trips -- Unmapped: Cities of Possibility -- Map 5: When We Were in the Projects : A topography of my mother's and my Chicago -- Map 6: Navigating Jazz : A map to the end of longing, with insets of my father's and my escape -- Map 7: Here Be Monsters : A cartography of the prairie, with overlays and panorama feature -- Triptik: Waterfront Property : New Orleans itinerary, with overlooks and meanderings -- Remapped: City in the Middle -- Legend Reinscribed: The Middle West as My Body -- Postmetropolis: Body Geographic -- About the Maps.

From award-winning author Barrie Jean Borich comes Apocalypse, Darling, a narrative, lyric exploration of the clash between old and new. Set in the steel mill regions of Chicago and in Northwest Indiana, the story centers on Borich’s return to a decimated landscape for a misbegotten wedding in which her spouse’s father marries his high school sweetheart. The book is a lilting journey into an ill-fated moment, where families attempt to find communion in tense gathering spaces and across their most formative disappointments. Borich tells the story of the industrial heartland that produced the steel that made American cities, but also one of the most toxic environmental sites in the world. As concise as a poem and as sweeping as an epic novel, Apocalypse, Darling explores the intersection of American traditional and self-invented social identities and the destruction and re-greening of industrial cityscapes. Borich asks: can toxic landscapes actually be remediated and can patriarchal fathers ever really be forgiven? In a political climate where Borich is forced to daily re-enter the toxic wastelands she thought she’d long left behind, Apocalypse, Darling is an urgent collision of broken spaces, dysfunctional affections, and the reach toward familial and environmental repair.