I never really believed that where I lived mattered, so it was not without some sense of trepidation that I undertook writing a review of “27 Views of Wilmington: The Port City in Prose and Poetry” (Eno, $15.95). In general I think good writers write what they want, and any idea of giving a writer a prompt defeats the purpose of having written in the first place. I expected this volume to be filled with nothing but claptrap and vainglory about pretty beaches and not much else. I was delighted to be dead wrong.

Several of these works are challenging and nuanced explorations of this place we call home. I was glad to find several pieces that grappled with the city’s dreadful past—the race riots of 1898—and there are some touching pieces here, especially Marlon Rachquel Moore’s “The Evidence of Things Unforgotten” which in its slight three pages dodges and weaves through this complicated history in deliciously languid prose.

UNC Wilmington’s own professor Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams contributed an essay entitled “Dog & Wolf,” an extremely challenging essay, which for this reviewer unfolded with the quiet, melancholic candor of the great French writer Marguerite Duras: “Let us say this essay is an accounting of dusk as I am currently experiencing it,” she writes.

Gwenyfar—no last name given—herself an owner of the world-famous Old Books on Front Street shop, which is, predictably, a secondhand and out-of-print bookshop on Front Street downtown (you’ve probably been to the place: old piano in the back, the world’s only “literary jukebox,” and about a hundred thousand books), contributes an excellent piece entitled “Where You Find It.” This essay is a simple affair, documenting the day-to-day kindness of those who give the community its charm, but there’s just something about it that makes it a perfect treatment of the city itself, perhaps just the wisdom one encounters in quiet corners of old bookshops.

For me, though, there was one piece that rose above the rest: “Ode to My Backyard,” by Robert Anthony Siegel, who also teaches here at UNCW. When I read the title, I do admit, I muttered to myself “Christ, here it comes…” expecting this to be the cliché I was expecting from the outset. Not so. Mr. Siegel’s backyard is a somewhat sinister place—he relates a story of wading through a swamp hunting a snake with a baseball bat, all of this under the dreadful stare of a real country sumbitch of a neighbor—but, in the end, the imagery compiles to something godlike, something worthy of an ode.

“27 Views of Wilmington” can be found where real books sold by real people are found, at local independent bookstores Pomegranate Books (4418 Park Avenue, Wilmington) or Old Books on Front Street (249 N. Front Street, Wilmington). Eno Publishers is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to producing high quality books in all formats about the culture and history of the Carolinas and the South.