A Belonging Field: (Salt Modern Poets)

'Harvest' October full of dust, floating dimly then falling, the sun burnished garish & whiskey. Its light seeped like dye into the cracked ground. Children softly erupted as their fathers sat in tractors, pulling a curtain closed. I was a child, among the rubble, silos spilling bricks from the top down, cold barns filled with mice, pickup trucks half-crushed and abandoned: convicts all banished to the same unfinished country. The corn outgrew us, clogging our horizons until all we could see was our small box of sky. My father would come home so covered with dust he looked like a scarecrow, his eyes colored hollow with black marker. Staring contests to pass the time, my brother & I, tears running down our cheeks, mother walking in & asking 'what's wrong?'. I learned about disappearing as the combine left its trail of crop-dust, a blizzard of absence billowing into the remaining stalks; each row of corn was a collapsing wall to a museum of emptiness. I have always felt that I have been spared somehow. At night, we snuck out into the freshly shorn fields to make sure our neighbors were still there, house cloaked for months by the climbing plants. We would see the neighbor children had escaped with us, pale, desperately chasing after themselves across their moon-filled yard. We would send them messages in code with our flashlights, saying 'From over here, you look like ghosts'.

Table of Contents:
I. Book of the Rising Field Country As . . . On Finding a Marijuana Plant in the Garden Hail Book of the Rising Field A Belonging Field Moth, Boredom, after Planting Locusts Harvest Conceptual Shadeland Livestock Darkness The Flight of the Great Owl A Chicken Coop Falls in December Buzzard Song II. The Minutiae of Passage Gnats Cicadas Flies Frogs III. Dispatches from an Eroding Season The Seeds of Winter in Summer Winter Wars Adaptability Dispatch, Minnesota Dispatch, 4th of July Dispatch, October IV. Fault Interlude Cartography Morning with Twenty-Eights Fault Crow Call The Busselton Jetty The Pinnacles Economies of Space Bower Birds: Adam & Eve The Nightmare V. Single Hours Light (A Personal History) Flamenco Scratches Prolonging the Inevitable Diary of the Oldest Man in Knox County Bean Walking, Some Lessons Boils Without Power Firstborn Thornburn Park Inventory, 1987 Fire-Breathing in the Circus of Sorrow Five Hauntings

About the Author :
Andrew Grace was born in 1978 in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where his family has farmed for several generations. He studied English literature at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he currently resides. His poems have appeared in several journals and he is the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize.

Review :
Andy Grace's poems pick up and turn over everything you missed the first time around. Nothing escapes his notice - it's as if he is tuned in to every frequency at once. The poems are beautifully textured, delicate and yet disturbing - an unforgettable world of gnats, flies and locusts, "whirring ocean of motes and spores", apprehended and remade with a facility and confidence rare in a new poet. -- Tracy Ryan