The Mineral Point Poetry Series, no. 10 • Release Date: November 20, 2018

Print ISBN: 978-1-948559-21-8 • Ebook ISBN: 978-1-948559-24-9

Brain Mill Press offers Calf Canyon for direct sale in ebook and trade paperback. Ebook buyers receive access to MOBI (Kindle), EPUB, and PDF files, offered without DRM restrictions. Print book buyers receive a physical copy of the book as well as access to the ebook files in all formats.

I am trying to tell my unborn daughter a story. It is an old story
that hangs on the spinneret tip of a spider’s abdomen,
the spider’s heart a bruise,
each chamber a stitch that nicks the copper blood
as it rushes through, each valve sighing out
like the hush that hung
lodged in everyone’s lungs,
a silence stacked between plates on the drying rack,
a thrum that vibrated the blades of his kitchen knives.

With long-limbed free verse and highly textured prose, Calf Canyon builds an origin myth with uncertain consequences and bald violence. McCartt-Jackson imagines a landscape where memories are permeable, physical places: the watersides of rural Kentucky and the Ozarks give way to the dry gulches and deep ravines of California as the speaker attains adulthood and her relationships become more fraught with danger.

So, this: / you didn’t mean to / tear out the part of you you didn’t like / by tearing out a part of me / for the sixth, seventh, eighth, twelfth time you decided: / love was my heart, / the size of your fist.

Domestic meditations vine with the thorns of the natural world in a collection that is bare-handed, wind-polished, and visceral, and McCartt-Jackson’s command of imagery leaves the reader with sculptural playback of brutal love and resonant feelings. This is a collection to read beginning to end, and from the end to the first poem, interleaving the pages with marginalia, tears, and the reader’s own memories. Rarely does a poet bend such gifted, formal craft to the requirements of fierce feeling.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kentucky poet, folklorist, and educator Sarah McCartt-Jackson has been published by Indiana Review, Journal of American Folklore, The Maine Review, Tidal Basin Review, NANO Fiction, Bellingham Review, and others. She is the recipient of an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, and has served as artist-in-residence for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Shotpouch Cabin through Oregon State University. She is the author of Stonelight, which won the 2017 Airlie Prize, and two chapbooks, Vein of Stone and Children Born on the Wrong Side of the River, which won the 2015 Mary Ballard Poetry Prize. She works on a farm in Louisville.

THE BROADSIDE

Brain Mill Press commissioned a special 8 x 10″ broadside for Calf Canyon, featuring hand-set metal type and printed on French Paper Company fine art paper in a limited edition of fifty, designed and printed by letterpress artist Lindsay Schmittle at Gingerly Press.

The broadside can be purchased separately or as a bundle with the print edition of Calf Canyon.

 

AN EXCERPT from Calf Canyon: Poems by Sarah McCartt-Jackson

© Sarah McCartt-Jackson, 2018

 

Calf Canyon
| Crossing |

 

I am trying to tell my unborn daughter a story. It is an old story

that hangs on the spinneret tip of a spider’s abdomen

 

the spider’s heart a bruise,

each chamber a stitch that nicks the copper blood

as it rushes through, each valve sighing out

like the hush thathung

 

lodged in everyone’s lungs

a silence stacked between plates on the drying rack

a thrum that vibrated the blades of his kitchen knives.

I had to hide under the trailer steps,

the jaw of the shotgun I unloaded

when I heard his truck tires coming,

the unspent slugs plunked in the toilet tank.

 

My unborn child’s story begins as the terrible budding star of a black widow,

her red eyes a speck glinting in the swamp cooler:

 

—.—

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