Mark Charron is a new voice, a writer from New England just starting out fresh and bright, and this, POEMS FROM THE SPRAWL, is his debut work, a collection of poems written from and about the suburbs. "My intent with this was to marry Frost with Corso..." And by honing such diverse styles across these pages, Charron blends together a bold and at times personal portrait of the experience of growing up and coming of age as a late-20th-century all-American boy of the suburbs. Along with Poems from the Sprawl, this anthology includes four other volumes of his earlier poetry, spanning from adolescent punk-brat songs of love and protest to stories of redemption and change, from the carnal to the spiritual, and other backstreets. Through it all is wove a young man's tale, one both of looking back to where one comes and out to where it's all going in the end. This book contains five volumes: 1) Poems from the Sprawl, 2) Porter Daryl's Poems, 3) Farewell Frat Row, 4) The Choirboy, 5) Morning Story.

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.

For decades the suburbs have been where art happens despite: despite the conformity, the emptiness, the sameness. Time and again, the story is one of gems formed under pressure and that resentment of the suburbs is the key ingredient for creative transcendence. But what if, contrary to that, the suburb has actually been an incubator for distinctly American art, as positively and as surely as in any other cultural hothouse? Mixing personal experience, cultural reportage, and history while rejecting clichés and pieties and these essays stretch across the country in an effort to show that this uniquely American milieu deserves another look.

This collection of poems examines creation as a continual force, an evolving action, an ever-spreading sprawl. Separated into 5 seasons, these poems explore the ways the human heart and the natural environment are inseparably entwined.

New edition of a breathless prose work with a unique vision of suburbia.

Poetry.