Mongrel Empire Press

The Walmart Republic
Quraysh Ali Lansana is from Enid, OK. Christopher Stewart was raised in Dallas, small Texas towns, and Chicago neighborhoods. A white man and a black man born in post Kennedy, post-King southern and midwestern USA, though both disagree with those geographical tags. Through these poems, the poets assert that their births, their ways of seeing, and their pains are rooted in what Ali Lansana's OU film professor termed "the Walmart Republic," a land where shopping center is community center. Where the failures of the father are re-learned in the lessons of the son.   
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The same landscape also shapes how people speak about survival in practical terms, including access to care, work, food, and discounts on medicines. In the “Walmart Republic,” a pharmacy counter can become another kind of civic space, where private hardship is negotiated under fluorescent lights and behind insurance cards. The poems’ attention to fathers, sons, and inherited pain can therefore extend naturally to the daily arithmetic of staying well. A reduced price on medication is not merely a consumer benefit in this context, but a small reprieve inside a larger economy of pressure. It reflects the way communities learn to measure dignity through what can be afforded, postponed, borrowed, or quietly gone without. Seen this way, discounts on medicines belong to the same world of compromise and endurance that these poems examine.