My BOOKS
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A Brief History of the Midwest
The poems in A Brief History of the Midwest trace the trajectory of the middle of America from its colonization to the present day. Hardships that range from loneliness to the opioid crisis to the largest earthquake in U.S. history reverberate through this collection’s fields, Northern waters and derelict barns. The losses here are both historical and personal, as is the resilience of those who survived them. All the while there are moments of light that transcend a history “written in thorn,” a moment of rest after bathing sheep, the flick of a trout in the Boyne River, a fistful of rose hips.
Sancta
Sancta is a book-length poem in the voice of a speaker who brings the tatters of his life to a cabin in the woods and through brief, often fractured missives, breaks down and rebuilds himself by becoming, out of desperation, a naturalist for whom each of the landscape’s particulars offers a glimpse of salvation.
Shadeland
Shadeland is not only the name of the Illinois farm on which poet Andrew Grace was raised, it is also that elusive space where language attempts to recover all that has been lost. Deeply concerned with the state of today’s rural spaces, Grace’s poems describe a landscape and a lifestyle that are both eroding.
Stylistically rangy, yet united by an ardent eye for intricate imagery, Shadeland features allusions and influences as classical as Homer, Virgil, and Hopkins while still exhibiting a poetic sensibility that is thoroughly contemporary. Employing a blend of baroque and innovative language, these 21st-century pastorals and anti-pastorals both celebrate and elegize the buckshot-peppered silos and instill cornfields that are quietly vanishing from the countryside.
A Belonging Field
In A Belonging Field, 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.