Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide

by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

Overview

Using the form of a guidebook and complicating definitions of flyover country and culture, this collection weaves themes of wilderness and ownership, the rhythms of nature with human design, juxtaposing idyllic tales of life on the Plains with cautionary ones to offer an alternate view of the enigmatic prairie.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635340822
Publisher:	Finishing Line Press
Publication date:	01/20/2017
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.10(d)

About the Author

Sarah Fawn Montgomery holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from California State University-Fresno and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches and works as Prairie Schooner's Nonfiction Assistant Editor. She is the author of The Astronaut Checks His Watch (Finishing Line Press). Her work has been listed as notable several times in Best American Essays, and her poetry and prose have appeared in various magazines including Confrontation, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Fugue, Georgetown Review, The Los Angeles Review, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, North Dakota Quarterly, Passages North, The Pinch, Puerto del Sol, Southeast Review, The Rumpus, Terrain, Zone 3 and others.

Table of Contents

Catch a Wild Thing 1
Pioneer 2
Leaving Tracks 3
Barn Swallows 4
Talking Back 6
Thunderbird 7
Drowning 8
Great Aunt 10
Excluded 11
Altar 12
A Day for Elm 13
Prairie Lessons 14
Offerings 15
Woman's Work 16
Quicksand, Missouri 17
Catching Diamonds 18
Where the West Begins 19
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road 20
Murmuration 22
The Lake 23
Firefly 25
Family Heirlooms 26
Grass Roots 28

Editorial Reviews

Though Rand McNally may have chosen to exclude parts of the Dakotas from its atlas in the late 80's, Sarah Fawn Montgomery knows that there is, indeed, a there there, that "the Plains are an altar" where people make "hard offerings to this hard place" but also sink their roots deep into the soil and flourish. Like any good guide, Leaving Tracks "makes(s) the myth of the land readable" and shows us that "there need be no contradiction between utility and beauty." -Grace Bauer, author of Nowhere All At Once and The Women At The Well Sarah Fawn Montgomery's poems grapple with the complicated human tension between wilderness and domestication, between body and will: "try/ to make something so untamed your own," she challenges, and reminds us that there is ". . . only a membrane of grass separating you from the thrum that pumps beneath." These extraordinary lyrics confront our ambivalent relationship with nature, and our persistent resistance to seeing ourselves as part of the earth we try to subdue. They offer abundant wisdom, and they offer true grace. They will stay with me for a very long time. -Corrinne Clegg Hales, author of To Make it Right The poems in Sarah Fawn Montgomery's new collection, Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide, are less "a prairie lesson for survival," than a celebration of and reverence for this brutal and beautiful landscape that refuses to be tamed. Each poem takes the small moments and actions of everyday life in the plains: canning peaches, finding cicada husks, bearing down in a storm, and speaks lovingly of the toil and sacrifice so many made to make a life in the "flyover" states. Through vivid imagery, Montgomery shows readers though that this is not a place to flyover, but one to submit to, one that provides sustenance in body and soul in the form of a space to test resilience, one that provides fertility as "a gift to those who don't give up." -Sarah A. Chavez, author of All Day, Talking

From the Publisher