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 )
Product Description
Andrew Grace leads us back into the heartland, where things still grow, where locusts tear at the edges, where “the corn outgrew us, clogging our horizon / until all we could see was our small box of sky.” Understated, sure-footed, these poems bring us close to a mythical American landscape, so that each of us can become seers again.
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.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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
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
