204 x 204mm, 112 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2025

A poet in her “transcendent late middle age,” Stacy Szymaszek takes a grant writing job at a farm where her office neighbors the dairy barn. The cows offer a way of remembering dailyness to a poet whose writing depends on it. She hears “the jaws of the herd moving in unison a hundred times over.” Her eyes become sensitized to cows picking them out of landscapes, even falsely assuming the cat passing by is just a far away bovine. Szymaszek watches the stillbirth of a calf and is then called back to her desk. Such is life in our century. Alongside Szymaszek’s dexterous examinations of music, myth, family, and aging, cows are born, paraded, eaten, brushed, milked and talked to. Essay, in which human and bovine life give one another meaning, contributes to a growing cow poetics that could include genealogical epics and a mode of address direct to cows,

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