First published in 1916, Chicago Poems is Carl Sandburg’s rough-edged portrait of an industrial America.

Sandburg writes in a loose, muscular free verse that deliberately drags poetry out of the drawing room and into the noise of ordinary work. The famous title poem gives Chicago its enduring image as the “City of the Big Shoulders,” and alongside this poems swagger are others more subtle, about poverty, migration, war, grief, exploitation and the beauty that persists inside mechanised life. The city becomes both subject and method.

A foundational collection of American modernist poetry, and particularly interesting now for the way Sandburg places labour and urban experience at the centre of literary attention.

Dover Publications, New York, 1994. Dover Thrift Editions. Unabridged paperback edition of the collection first published by Henry Holt in 1916. Light shelf wear and rubbing to wrappers, with minor edge and corner wear; internally clean and firmly bound. Very good condition. This edition is 88 pages.