CREVE COEUR

Poetry. Winter Editions, 2023. Paperback, 128 pages. 5.12" x 7.95"

From the press: Robert Fitterman’s sixteenth and most ambitious book transposes William Carlos Williams’s postwar long poem Paterson onto the segregated suburbs of late twentieth-century St. Louis to track the collapse of the American urban landscape.

Mirroring Paterson’s structure page-for-page, Fitterman translates Williams’s patchwork of local news stories, personal letters, and found historical documents into the landscapes and mythologies of his hometown, revisiting many of the horrific events of St. Louis and its environs on the way—the East St. Louis massacre, the demolition of social housing projects, military chemical testing in the inner city during the Cold War, and more. Through a weave of verse, archival documents, and found language, Creve Coeur entangles suburban sprawl with the racial violence at the root of American urbanization.

“One of our generation’s greatest poets returns to his Objectivist roots (sort of) in this unforgettable book which cracks one’s heart right through. William Carlos Williams would have loved it.”
—Sianne Ngai