Publisher's Synopsis
A new mother takes us on a tour of Hamil- ton, a Rust Belt city born of the Industrial Revolution and dying a slow death due to globalization. This mother represents the city's next wave of inhabitants—the artists and young parents who swarm a run-down area for its affordability, inevitably reshaping the neighborhoods they take over. Creation looks at gentrification from the inside out—an artist mother making a home and neighborhood for her family, struggling to find her place amid the exist- ing and emerging communities. While pushing her child's stroller around Hamilton, Nickerson shows us the warehouse filled with open barrels of toxic sludge, the parking lot where the city's homeless population sleeps, and the re- furbished Victorian house (complete with elegant chandeliers) that is now a state- of-the-art yoga studio. Creation presents the city as a living thing—a place where many small lives intersect and where death, motherhood, pollution, poverty, and violence are all interconnected. Drawn in evocative watercolor, Cre- ation is unafraid to leave questions open- ended as Nickerson wanders the city and ponders just where the personal and political intersect, and where they ought to intersect.
