Description
Book SynopsisAndrew Collard’s lyrical poems about Detroit show how the social and geographical past influences the present. Written from the perspective of a single parent raising a child amid increasing social isolation, economic insecurity, public catastrophes, and anxiety, Sprawl reminds us of the comforting endurance of communal experience.
Trade Review“‘Because to name / a thing can be a way to claim it,’ Andrew Collard writes in his stunning Sprawl, a poetic geography of the nation’s heartland placed in a metropolitan Detroit that the poet presents as Autotopia, in the age of the Anthropocene that Detroit so mightily helped to create. Powerfully and precisely attentive, beautifully crafted to encompass the imaginative breadth of his witness and vision, Collard’s poems provide us with indispensable ‘field reports from the interior’ with deeply articulate, heartfelt fury.” -- Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems
“Andrew Collard’s Sprawl refuses to shy away from the darkness yet is unafraid to acknowledge the strange beauties which whisper from the depths of fissures and the distances beyond peripheries. Collard captures complexities of contemporary life as the verse maintains its dichotomies, does not water down hardships nor loss. We explore a desperate sort of sadness, such as ‘what it means that I am from here // but can’t afford a home here.’ Yet the work rejects didacticism, instead painting palpable landscapes, places in which we can immerse ourselves for contemplation. These poems zoom into and out from intimate moments, showcasing nuances of public and private topographies. This collection is a superb demonstration of the role of the modern writer as witness to their times.” -- Heather Lang-Cassera, author of Gathering Broken Light, winner of the NYC Big Book Award in Poetry, Social/Political
“I admired the poet’s deeply felt intelligence alert to ‘the way the pieces move.’ The manuscript was an experience that gripped me from the beginning.” -- Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, finals judge
Table of ContentsDiorama 1
Future Ruins
Perpetual Motion 5
Quizzo Night at The Red Ox 7
Cicada Song 10
Pax Americana 11
Autotopia 13
Future Ruins 14
Wartime, Rally’s Drive-In 17
Carried 19
Clippings: Sterling Assembly Plant 23
Where the Birds Went
Crawling Backwards 27
The Nest 28
Unpunctuated Days 29
Elegy for the Dymaxion Car 31
Autotopia 34
They Say King’s Forest Boulevard Is Healing 35
Sub-pastoral 37
After News of a Border Shutdown, I Venture Out for Fries 39
Clippings: Sterling Assembly Plant 43
Sprawl
Gas & Food 47
Key Motor Mall 49
On the Demolition of Produce Kingdom 51
Telway Lament 53
Autotopia 56
Badlands Flashback 57
Night Music 59
Commute 61
Clippings: Sterling Assembly Plant 65
How to Be Held
Church can be a word for anywhere 69
Landscape with Ryegrass and Hunger 71
Idyll 73
City of Windows 74
Night Cycle 77
Autotopia 78
To My Son Henry, Asleep in the Next Room 80
Dear leasing office, dear oil slick 82
Acknowledgments 85
Notes and Dedications 87
