Buick City

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 clerk—the jobs that survived after the living wages disappeared. She speaks for the blighted yet beautiful souls subject to twenty pallets of diet soda to unload, mandatory piss tests, loading dock romances, and HR legalese. The collection feels—as good poetry should—like the walls between one person and the next are very thin."—Frank Montesonti