A Brief History of the Midwest

Overview

The poems in A Brief History of the Midwest trace the trajectory of the middle of America from its colonization to the present day. Its author was born and raised on Shadeland Farm in Urbana, Illinois where the Grace family has farmed for five generations and currently resides in rural central Ohio. The Midwest is often portrayed as one of two opposing cliches, namely as a cultural desert peppered with dilapidated factories and barns in which “average” Americans dwell, or oppositely as a pastoral retreat from urban coastal life where those who are weary of modernity can visit and find solace in the rolling cornfields tended by the salt of the earth who live simpler lives than those who live in America’s major cities. Each of these cliches are obviously false, and contain various insulting assumptions. A Brief History of the Midwest is an attempt to capture the Midwest as it exists in reality, with all of its contradictions. This book is meant to be an antonym to the way the Midwest is described in Hillbilly Elegy.Central influences are Diane Seuss, Charles Wright, C.D. Wright, Jim Harrison and C.S. Giscombe.

Reviews

"'I should have talked / to someone before now / and not you,' says one poem to the reader in Andrew Grace's gorgeous new collection A Brief History of the Midwest. Grace writes with pith and precision, crafting poems of deep intellect and feeling that weave through crises of grief, crises of faith, the relationships between fathers and sons, the mythos of self-sufficiency, alcohol, wildlife, and rivers as rendered in literature and in life. 'Poetry is not talking,' writes Grace, and his poems deliver on this proposition spectacularly, communicating with us in ways that compress, complicate, and far surpass ordinary exchange." —Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing

"Andrew Grace is an expert in what I like to call Close Looking, a tender attentiveness to place, and the people who are the engine of a place, all of which springs to life in A Brief History Of The Midwest. This is a massively generous, incredibly transportive book." —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest and A Little Devil In America

"This stunning collection approaches a complex region of our current America with an original, unflinching eloquence. I returned to it more than once to marvel at the way the poet navigates, with rare musicality and subtle formal touch, the befuddling river of the Midwest, it's 'simple, unbearable stars', its luminous grief." —Chris Dombrowski, author of Ragged Anthem

Author Biography

Andrew Grace was born and raised on Shadeland Farm in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.He is the the author of three books of poems, A Belonging Field (Salt Publishing), Shadeland (Ohio State University Press) and SANCTA (Ahsahta/Foundlings). His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Boston Review, New Criterion and Adroit Journal amongst others. A recipient of the Guy Owen Prize from the Southern Poetry Review and two Ohio Arts Council awards for Individual Excellence, he is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford and is a Senior Editor at the Kenyon Review. He teaches at Kenyon College.