Slabs of the Sunburnt West

Carl Sandburg's poetry collection captures Chicago as a city of iron, smoke, and living flesh. These thirty-two poems reject sentimentality in favor of raw, muscular verses about immigrants sweating in slaughterhouses, trains thundering across the plains, and the brutal, beautiful machinery of American industry. Sandburg writes without apology about the harsh edges of Midwestern life: the poverty, the labor, the gritty reality beneath the city's towering smoke stacks. Yet there's a strange tenderness in his eye for the working man, the arrester in the roundhouse, the woman selling papers at midnight. This is poetry that smells of steel and coal dust, that hears the clatter of the elevated train and the foghorn on Lake Michigan. It established Sandburg as the poet of industrial America, unflinching and alive.