In his first collection in a dozen years, Chicago-based poet, artist, and musician Marvin Tate explores memory, identity, and the unseen emotional labor of survival in Black urban life. Informed by Tate's experiences growing up on Chicago's West Side, these works parse the ongoing process of self-definition across varied environments: street, stage, memory, interior life. Moving between poetry, monologue, and performance score, 4th Shift traces how masculinity, race, sexuality, class, and artistic identity are formed, challenged, and reimagined over time.
