Since the early Nineteen Nineties, Jeremiah Moss has lived in—and fiercely beloved—New York City. In 2007, the poet and psychoanalyst launched the weblog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, which turned the muse for 2017’s well-received Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul. In weblog and ebook, Moss bemoaned the damaging outcomes of hypergentrification.
Five years on, Moss is again within the fray with the passionate and probing Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York, wherein he rails in opposition to the outcomes of New York’s tectonic shifts in inhabitants and character throughout what he calls the “profound accidental experiment” of the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Moss expertly and infrequently hilariously indulges his inside curmudgeon when describing the latest inflow of moneyed and thoughtless “New People” and rhapsodizing in regards to the metropolis that emerged as soon as they fled the virus’ epicenter. Along the way in which, he considers what’s left when the dominant class is skimmed off the highest of a metropolis. After all, the New People produce other locations to go, however what occurs to those that don’t have any different choices—or an entire incapability to think about dwelling anyplace else?
As Moss walks and bicycles across the metropolis every single day, he joins protests and rallies and wee-hours dance events in search of solutions (whereas avoiding police intent on tamping down riot and revelry). He additionally displays on his newfound emotions of confidence and freedom as a transgender man who reveled within the joyful queer power that infused the streets of New York in its feral state.
When officers started declaring that New York ought to “get back to normal,” Moss felt unhappy that he (and town as a complete) appeared to be reverting to pre-lockdown habits. Who and what, he wonders, is regular anyway? Who decides, and why? Is this newly rediscovered rebellious spirit gone for good?
In Feral City, Moss has created an indelible portrait of a metropolis in transition; it vibrates with eat-the-rich power and time-marches-on poignancy. “One day,” he writes, “the tide will shift and New York will change, as it always does. That, as people like to say, is the one thing you can count on in this town.” Perhaps he’ll be again to put in writing about it when it does.
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