Toby Altman’s Discipline Park documents the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, a landmark of architectural brutalism designed by Bertrand Goldberg in the 1970s. Altman was born in the building, and years later, was employed by Northwestern University when they tore it down. His personal proximity to the site leads to a wider critical evaluation of the cruelty of a neoliberalism that asks us to draw sustenance from the very institutions that poison and erase our bodies, habitats, and histories. But, as it indicts the present and its claustrophobic, ruinous politics, Discipline Park also recovers or reinvents utopian vistas through an extended engagement with Goldberg's architectural practices.

Toby Altman is the author of Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2025), Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2023), and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has received fellowships from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Northwestern University and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His scholarly and creative work can be found in Contemporary Literature, English Literary History, Gulf Coast, jacket2, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among other journals and anthologies. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Beloit College.

Softcover, 112 pages, 7.79 x 10 inches
Passage Series #4
ISBN: 978-1-7359242-8-1