Praise

“In this visionary collection, Andrew Collard is on high alert, pulling in wild, scattered images into thrumming riffs that keep us alive in a world that rarely recognizes us. You too will read these brilliant lines aloud to someone you love and dance the unlikely dances.”

—Jim Daniels, author of Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems

“Collard actively constructs a rugged landscape of American tenderness and collapse—where grocery aisles, flooded freeways, and the hum of late-night Motown become the scaffolding of survival. These poems move through Michigan’s post-industrial landscapes with a steady ache for connection, asking what remains when literal and figurative infrastructures fail, particularly in a contemporary wasteland degraded by late-stage capitalism and sociopolitical unrest. Lo-Fi Citadels is both elegy and anthem—a mixtape of endurance where the everyday is mythic and ruin is radiant.”

—Iliana Rocha, author of The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez

“Andrew Collard brings the eye of a naturalist to these poems—if by nature one might consider the post-industrial urban and suburban landscapes where all the forces of commerce and culture come to bear on human relationships and the individual imagination. Whether considering ‘love as American as a shutoff notice,’ or ‘the strongholds / we’ve established among the asphalt’s interludes,’ Collard refuses to see the personal as disconnected from the places and forces that give it shape. This is an important book and one I’ll be reading for many years to come.”

—David Hornibrook, author of Night Manual

“‘I see something I want you to see,’ writes Andrew Collard in ‘Bus Stop Promenade.’ What he sees are the people who are often unseen: commuters, custodians, and cashiers, those whose lives are ‘as American as a shutoff notice.’ Collard also hears something he wants us to hear—music and the ‘current of sound’ in our daily lives—while warning us of the siren’s call of consumerism, the ‘amplifier / for ideas that someone else wants [us] thinking of.’ Lo-Fi Citadels is a glorious mixtape of precarity and pleasure. You will want to read it on repeat.”

—Erin Murphy, author of Human Resources and editor of The Book of Jobs: Poems About Work