Creve Coeur

Robert Fitterman

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structure page-for-page, Fitterman translates Williams's patchwork of local news stories, personal letters, and found historical documents into the landscapes and mythologies of his hometown, revisiting many of the horrific events of St. Louis and its environs on the way-the East St. Louis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.

'A latter-day Paterson in form, an innovative hybrid essay-poem in style, Creve Coeur strides into the heart of suburban-and urban-St. Louis as few have, power walking through familial stories, specific and broader regional histories, personal archives and anecdotes, factlets, trivia, and anonymous missives to understand what this 'broken heart' of America might reveal about itself and the US. Gathering in voices that show the Mound City's and its suburbs' racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies and the specificities and banalities of social dispersal, Fitterman finds truths as prepossessing as St. Louisans' beloved Provel cheese and as haunting as the ghostly voices from the Creve Coeur Falls.' – John Keene

'In Rob Fitterman's sprawling tribute to both his hometown outside St. Louis and William Calos Williams's epic, Paterson, myth and history blur into one another-hardened by fact, stubborn in truth. Pitting urban planning against suburban development, Fitterman dredges up the buried bodies of the long forgotten and misbegotten, from the ordinary racism and class exclusions that shaped his suburban upbringing to the multiple origin stories of the 'broken-hearted lake' at the center of this poem.' – Tyrone Williams

'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