Charles Sweetman teaches writing at Washington University in St. Louis. His chapbook manuscript Incorporated won the 2007 Dream Horse Press Chapbook Prize. He has published numerous essays, poems, and stories including the chapbook Lake House and Other Stories. His fiction and poetry have appeared in such places as River Styx, GSU Review, and Poet Lore.

Books by Charles Sweetman: Enterprise, Inc.

About Enterprise, Inc.:

"What a sly and nimble book, smiling with a mouth full of fangs. Sweetman’s casual, chummy lines lead one cheerfully into a cubicled inferno where the damned—knights, kings, and cowboys, yet never quite corner office material—slog in the long shadows of upper management, neck-deep in leadership plans, always aware that they lack some essential “intangible assets,” yet incorrigibly optimistic, prepared to be lifted into the light of success. They’re shallow, lost, and easy to like. This is satire at its best: sweet-tongued and fierce."
—Marshall N. Klimasewiski

"The enterprise here is in the way Chuck Sweetman gets the voices from—gives voice to—those denizens of the contemporary counting houses seldom heard in contemporary poetry: the white-collared, computer-screened, entry-leveled, and encubicled. It isn’t just that he surveys undercharted terrain and brings back news of the natives, but that he brings the news that stays news of poems, poems that glitter with wit and psychological acuity. Yet Sweetman manages to balance irony with sympathy in these portraits of the working stiffs of the information age. The job-submerged, the heroes of the subtle resistance, the fantasists-by-necessity, the artists-in-waiting pictured here make up a world to which (and in which) readers may find themselves drawn."
—Jason Sommer

"There’s no reverie for birds, sky, or gurgling streams in Enterprise, Inc. Nonetheless, I’m inclined to label Charles Sweetman a nature poet—human nature, that is. His is a wry, insightful portrait of life in the world of the business cubicle (metaphoric, psychological and actual) endured daily by so many souls. His poems have a narrative, cinematic quality. They offer a blend of hapless workaday personalities—ala the TV series The Office—and the awful sense of entrapment portrayed in the harrowing film “Glengarry, Glen Ross.” He uses the jargon of the workplace to reveal the angst, hilarity and pathos of Everyman, and he does it with an ear ever attuned to the music of poetry as well as to message. Sweetman’s collection is a most worthy enterprise, and a great read."
—Kathleen Lynch