Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. This hybrid genre collection of poetry and prose tells the story of one Philadelphia neighborhood, 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