The Rust Belt has no specific borders and is less a geographic region than a term used to describe the country’s once-proud manufacturing center — including Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland and Flint, Mich. — and its slow and painful decline in the past four decades. Many have tried to define the Rust Belt, but a new collection of essays “Voices from the Rust Belt,” edited by Anne Trubek (Picador), lets the residents describe the places they call home. (“I used to be afraid of the mills, or what was left of them in the late 1970s,” begins an essay called “A Girl’s Youngstown.”

With titles like “Confessions of a Rust Belt Orphan; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Akron,” “Can Detroit Save White People?” and “Cleveland’s Little Iraq,” the essays run the gamut from sad and nostalgic to angry or hopeful, inviting the reader to see these towns as more than just a negative headline or a statistic. “There is power in simply bearing witness, to learn about individual lives and specific places. And to resist the urge to make of this place a static, incomplete cliche . . .” writes Trubek. “So the writers in this book seek you and say: This is me and I am here. But more, they say: Please pay attention. Please listen. Let us tell you our story. We can tell it ourselves.”