Nine Acres by Nathaniel Perry, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

Selected by Marie Howe from over one thousand submissions, Nine Acres is the winner of theAmerican Poetry Review/APR Honickman First Book Prize. Taking their titles from chapters of a 1930s small-scale farming handbook, the fifty-two poems in this cycle create a handbook for living and explore sustainability on many levels-on the land, in the family, and in the spirit. As Marie Howe writes in her introduction to the book, Nathanial Perry has collected poems into this book as one plants a field, as an act of husbandry: each line a furrow where seeds flourish or fail. Husbandry-to create a dwelling place and to care for it-these are the ancient acts.""Soil Surface Management"I spent the afternoon breakingground. The tiller bucked and groanedat the job, but with each pass I sawa perfect blankness, like I'd been loaneda second life in which to growa third. The sun sat on its porchand smiled. I wondered if the dirtwould be enough, a kind of torchto set inside our lives to say, we'll grow our food like this, our planswill look like this -like soil squaredand measured into beds by a mansweating through his shirt with effort. In dirt is one life we can chooseto make. I spent the afternoonbreaking what I knew we'd use. Nathaniel Perry lives with his family in rural southside Virginia. He is the editor of theHampden-Sydney Poetry Review and teaches at Hampden-Sydney College. " | Nine Acres by Nathaniel Perry, Paperback | Indigo Chapters