by Dina Folgia
The cover of Andrew Collard’s debut collection of poetry, Sprawl, is bleak, in gradations of gray. It is, like the landscape of Detroit, industrial. From afar, it seems like an urban effigy. In the first poem, “Diorama,” Collard writes: “When the neighborhood I once mistook for home is placed in context / and stands revealed as hostile, the freeway south crowded with ghosts / of homes its engineers designed to destroy.” The crux of Sprawl is simply that—home, despite all that has plagued it.
This collection, which won the 2023 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize from Ohio University Press, takes urban bleakness and transforms it into something livable. Collard crafts deeply personal moments as a photographer might arrange a photograph, with careful edits and delicate frames. There is a rhythm to these poems that carries the reader from one moment to the next as Collard describes the landscape of modern-day Detroit and how consumerism, urban economics, and disenfranchisement shape the painful growth from American child to American adult, both for the poet and his young son. This rhythm, shown in the movement of fragments, lines, and couplets across the page, oftentimes employing generous white space, is central to Collard’s style.
In the poem “To My Son Henry, Asleep in the Next Room,” Collard writes: “Maybe the sound of work, / after a while, becomes a kind of song to sleep to.” This work, which takes Collard from mowing the lawn with his father (“Quizzo Night at The Red Ox”) to the front desk in an emergency room (“Unpunctured Days”), challenges the American ideal of a hard-earned prosperous future, or what he calls in the first section of the collection our “future ruins.” Collard constructs an elaborate backdrop to these poems, steeped deeply in Americana—the Magic Wok food court, Jet’s Pizza, Trinity Lutheran Church, the “thirty-five-foot-tall golden halo” placed in front of the deadliest intersection in Michigan. The concept of “future ruins” implies an underlying impermanence to anything we might consider permanent, things we cannot imagine living our American lives without. Collard doesn’t just confront this impermanence; he highlights it.
One of the most poignant throughlines in Sprawl is Collard’s “Autotopia” suite. With one poem of this name in each movement of the collection, Collard ensures that readers don’t forget the role that the automotive industry has played in the ebb and flow of the economy of Detroit, while also using the industry as a jumping-off point to discuss broader concepts related to the transience of American culture. In the first “Autotopia” he writes: “O Autotopia, what will you bleed / once the wind becomes uncivil, / and the oil runs out?” Common concepts of American disenfranchisement can easily become stale, but Collard finds new ways to talk about old problems. This is what makes Sprawl a truly remarkable collection and a stunning debut.
Sprawl is a collection that is steeped in equal parts resignation and hope. Andrew Collard writes with the honesty and clarity most writers spend decades attempting to achieve. He takes his readers gently by the hand, offers them a glimpse into the heart of the sprawl, and invites them to view the full scope of the societal structures that shaped it. In his final installment of “Autotopia,” Collard offers his readers this heart, still humming like an engine in their hands: “We were going / where the years went, as we watched entire decades / dissipate up and down these streets we walked, hand in hand, / the same place we’re still going, / in all the world no day like this.”
