by Tess Brown-Lavoie (Author)
This is an entertaining book of epistolary poems in prose which light up a young farmer's year through external and internal signs and cues, reaching out and reaching in, the lightness of being, loving, and dreaming. The poems don't really tell any stories but they narrate an enchanting and intellectually stimulating subjectivity. The subject of the poems is love, growth, illness, wellness, detachment and attachment as told by an embodied disembodied prime mover, a daughter, sister, lover, farmer. There is an addressee, which longed-for presence provides soil for the embedding of contact. A journal of the times of year in which a body grows quiet, then active, then reflective, then expressive, with all the contemporary appliances, texts, and devices. There is a violence to the transmission of effluence and effluvia; a sweetness to the extrusion of affect.
Author Biography
Tess Brown-Lavoie is a writer and farmer in Providence, Rhode Island. She runs Sidewalk Ends Farm with her sisters, and plays drums in the band Mother Tongue. Tess works on land access as the RI Field Agent at Land For Good, coordinates the Justice and Agriculture Working Group in Rhode Island, and serves as the Vice President of the National Young Farmers Coalition Board.