Nine Acres

Selected by Marie Howe from over one thousand submissions, Nine Acres is the winner of the American 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 breaking ground. The tiller bucked and groaned at the job, but with each pass I saw a perfect blankness, like I’d been loaned a second life in which to grow a third. The sun sat on its porch and smiled. I wondered if the dirt would be enough, a kind of torch to set inside our lives to say, we’ll grow our food like this, our plans will look like this like soil squared and measured into beds by a man sweating through his shirt with effort. In dirt is one life we can choose to make. I spent the afternoon breaking what I knew we’d use.

Nathaniel Perry lives with his family in rural southside Virginia. He is the editor of the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review and teaches at Hampden-Sydney College.