I'm happy to announce that Cracked Slab Books (the press I edit) has published Garin Cycholl's new book Rafetown Georgics. You can purchase your copy here.
Praise for Rafetown Georgics
There’s much to be learned here. At this long moment—this book—in Garin Cycholl’s continuing project the prairie’s a verb (“light cracked and/ prairied”), the landscape of the Midwest “a haggard trophy”; these pages tangle exquisitely with the varieties of distance and from South-of-70 to the city of the big shoulders and beyond, the work teases belief out of chrome, tours the nature of vipers, and traces (and burns) the blue in green. Rafetown Georgics is a confidence of practical matters (rural and otherwise), a jukebox of voices telling wonders, an astonishing book.
— C. S. Giscombe
Garin Cycholl’s georgics are the rustic songs and ditties of those who work the earth. (Geo = earth; ergon = work.) Obsessive listing of the objects of the earth—from its plant names to its place names to the makes of the automobiles that its laborers crisscross it with—is Cycholl’s mode in Rafetown Georgics, from out of which he represents American landscapes with a perfect, weary, and witty clarity, “a field, / planted with stones, even the words broken, me / a lingering god.” This is holy, ancient poetry.
— Peter O’Leary
Farmers and Merchants Bank
But that two-handed engine
at the door “Everybody get down!”
four men in overalls robbery
with a gun Mr. Long and I
crossing the bridge at Chester
engine at the door Elbert
Ikemire and Molly Clifton on the
floor James Cogwell opens the
safe just chump change
Robert Bunnell enters but that
two-handed engine at the door
shotgun in his side “If
I were you, I’d—“ he drops
his money bag down
to the water
down to the water
down to the water down
to Martin Stephan’s Red Bud
grave and the Valley of Lost
Lutherans Mr. Long and I a tip?
Sheriff Speaks and that deputy
in hot pursuit west on the
Vandalia Road what was in
the ditches? if we had a radio
we could get that music from the
Aragon Ballroom but instead
that two-handed engine in the
ditches beebalm and milkweed and
rattlesnake plantains at the door
trespassed west of Altenburg Mr. Long
undrawered letters behind the
general store’s counter: Your father
& I don’t seem to understand you
anymore down the ravine (a few
shots were fired) that
two-handed engine at the door
one Louis Bangas of Chicago
hiding in some bushes Why
have you done this? Why this
need to get to Sacramento? Isn’t
Frohna good enough for you? What
two-handed? one man recognized by
several Clay County residents as
Glenn Montgomery sent to the
state pen at Chester every goddamned
May 17th in the hole
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