These lyrical poems about growing up and becoming a parent in Detroit reflect deeply felt connections to places and experiences that inevitably fall victim to irrevocable change.
Sprawl is a reconstruction of the constantly shifting landscape of metropolitan Detroit, which extends over six counties and is home to over four million people, from the perspective of a single parent raising a young child amid financial precarity. Part memoir, part invention, the book is Andrew Collard's attempt to reconcile the tenderness and sense of purpose found in the parent-child relationship with ongoing societal crises in the empire of the automobile. Here, a mansion may contrast with a burned-out home just up the street. How does one construct a sense of place in such a landscape, where once-familiar neighborhoods turn to strip malls or empty lots and the relationships that root us dissolve? Sprawl suggests that there is solace in recognizing that when we ask this question, we are never alone in asking.
Within the larger geographical space of the metropolis are the in-between places of personal significance: the gas stations, burger joints, malls, and parking lots where many of the defining moments of ordinary lives occur. These poems take deep inspiration from such places, insisting on the value of the people found there, along with their experiences. What might be considered high and low culture are as inextricably linked in the formal cues of the poems as they are in the Michigan landscape, influenced by pop music, midcentury modern aesthetics, comic books, and cars.
While the sprawl of the title refers to the seemingly endless succession of businesses and neighborhoods extending north from Detroit ("a sprawl this extensive breeds / empty pockets"), it also invokes the sprawl of history through poems that move between the past and present. One sequence of poems built on old newspaper clippings draws attention to a Chrysler plant that once constructed Redstone missiles. Elsewhere, two poems refer to the Detroit newspaper strike of the 1990s, a local controversy with lasting implications for the community. Sprawl ultimately illuminates the relationship of one place to other places, contextualizing its characters and locales within a wider societal frame.
Table of Contents:
Diorama 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
About the Author :
Andrew Collard's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his son and their cats.
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." "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." "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."
