SPRAWL

<p>“SPRAWL in fact does not sprawl at all; rather, it radiates with control and fresh, strange reflection.” —<em>Bookforum</em></p><p>“Reads as if Gertrude Stein channeled Alice B. Toklas writing an Arcades Project set in contemporary suburbia.” —<em>The Believer</em></p><p>When Danielle Dutton’s <em>SPRAWL</em> first broke upon the world in 2010, critics likened it to collage, a poetics of the suburbs, a literal unpacking of et cetera. This updated edition, with a new afterword by Renee Gladman, reopens the space of SPRAWL’s “fierce, careful composition”—as <em>Bookforum</em> wrote—“which changes the ordinary into the wonderful and odd.”</p><p><em>Today I fell asleep in the tall grass near the old train station. It was a complete picture. A fashionable park. Yet the picture had its sordid and selfish aspect. I can’t seem to say what I mean, Mrs. Barbauld, but with some urgency I mean to inform you what a triumph the big city has become. I am a secular individual but even I can feel the shift in the horizon utterly alien to the constitution of things, the habitual. Sincerely, etc. I move in shade on the edge of a parking lot under walnut trees in the early morning around the edge of a curve in an accidental manner. I walk the sidewalk and ripple the surface of it. From this condition I have a view of the world.</em></p><p><strong>Danielle Dutton </strong>is the author of <em>Margaret the First, SPRAWL</em>, and <em>Attempts at a Life</em>. Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in <em>The Paris Review, Harper’s, The White Review, Fence, BOMB</em>, and others. She is on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis and is co-founder and editor of the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project.</p>