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 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 breakingground. The tiller bucked and groanedat the job, but with each pass I sawa perfect blankness, like I'd been loaneda second life in which to growa third. The sun sat on its porchand smiled. I wondered if the dirtwould be enough, a kind of torchto set inside our lives to say,we'll grow our food like this, our planswill look like this —like soil squaredand measured into beds by a mansweating through his shirt with effort.In dirt is one life we can chooseto make. I spent the afternoonbreaking 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.