Germantown--a historic, beloved place, wrestling with legacies of colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Drawing from interviews, historical research, and two divergent but quintessential American texts ( The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans), Landers' Franklinstein is a monster readers have not encountered before.

"FRANKLINSTEIN is a church of stained glass truth- telling."--Yolanda Wisher

"In her study of Germantown, Landers derives a poetics of urban history, of being from, really from, a place--Philadelphia--that cuts itself into your skin."--Simone White

"This verse memoir, prose elegy, and documentary expose will remind some readers of Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead, which, we must recall, is also a book of the living."--Tyrone Williams