Poetry. Told in prose poems, BUICK CITY is a coming-of-age tale about growing up in the deindustrialized Midwest--about trailer park kids fending for themselves while laid-off parents navigate their new minimum wage jobs; about teenagers inventing sex on the loading dock behind the convenience store; about young people yearning for a life beyond making a living and fighting with customers at the 24 hour supermarket. From neighborhood Casanovas to part-time hitmen to grandmothers run-ragged, the portraits of life in BUICK ...
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Poetry. Told in prose poems, BUICK CITY is a coming-of-age tale about growing up in the deindustrialized Midwest--about trailer park kids fending for themselves while laid-off parents navigate their new minimum wage jobs; about teenagers inventing sex on the loading dock behind the convenience store; about young people yearning for a life beyond making a living and fighting with customers at the 24 hour supermarket. From neighborhood Casanovas to part-time hitmen to grandmothers run-ragged, the portraits of life in BUICK CITY offer a glimpse into the world beyond factory closings and rustbelt blight and into the life of a place teeming with desperation, joy, and hope. "Sarah Carson has an imaginative gift for transporting us within the nuances & netherworld of her hometown. I can't imagine are more dead-eye illumination of the region--told with incredible wit & a rough-minded passion. Many might steer you from the town itself, but missing out on BUICK CITY would be a decidedly wrong turn. I will gladly enjoy returning to these pages--and often."--Ben Hamper "Mercifully without glibness, derision or rancor, the sinewy poems in BUICK CITY chronicle the petty crimes taking place outside love motels and flavored with instant cocoa; the heart of the culture found in the break room at the back of a 24-hour supermarket. Like Updike's "A&P" retold by a Rust Belt girl born in 1984, Sarah Carson boldly goes where few poets dare--straight into a (Mid)Western consciousness redolent with pop rocks, black pepper, diet Coke and weed. I'm so grateful we have this desperate, hopeful, utterly American work."--Arielle Greenberg "Sarah Carson is the bard of the Flint, Michigan working class. Her poems sketch the lives of the workers in the post-manufacturing economy: the warehouse worker, the twenty-four hour store cl
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