Crosscut by Sean Prentiss
Sean Prentiss takes readers into what it means to be a rookie trail-crew leader guiding a motley collection of at-risk teens for five months of backbreaking work in the Pacific Northwest. It is a world where the sounds of trail tools - Pulaskis, McLeods, and hazel hoes - filter into dreams and set the rhythm of each day. In this memoir-in-poems, Prentiss shares a music most of us will never experience, set to tools swung and sharpened, backdropped by rain and snow and sun, as individuals transform into crew.
Prentiss's poetic debut, Crosscut, tells the story of a ragtag trail crew crisscrossing the Northwest, learning the woods and themselvesBy the end you, too, will pine for aching shoulders, dips in the river, and a night under the stars."
— Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die: A Novel
"Prentiss's poems have the muscular strength of a Pulaski swing - contact with earth and stone and wood, carving a trail in the wilderness away from all that hurts us, telling the tale of a crew of teenagers - so recently lost."
— Todd Davis, author of Native Species and Winterkill
"The world is strewn with nature poems, but too few of them feature blisters and sweat, as Sean Prentiss's do. My favorite poems here center the tools integral to life on a trail crew - chainsaws cut through bullshit, mattocks churn up new ground. Reader, open yourself to diction as incantation: Pulaski, hitch, crosscut. Sapwood, rakers, snag."
— Christine Byl, author of Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods
— Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die: A Novel
"Prentiss's poems have the muscular strength of a Pulaski swing - contact with earth and stone and wood, carving a trail in the wilderness away from all that hurts us, telling the tale of a crew of teenagers - so recently lost."
— Todd Davis, author of Native Species and Winterkill
"The world is strewn with nature poems, but too few of them feature blisters and sweat, as Sean Prentiss's do. My favorite poems here center the tools integral to life on a trail crew - chainsaws cut through bullshit, mattocks churn up new ground. Reader, open yourself to diction as incantation: Pulaski, hitch, crosscut. Sapwood, rakers, snag."
— Christine Byl, author of Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods
Sean Prentiss is an associate professor of English at Norwich University. He is the author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave (UNM Press) and the coauthor of Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology. He lives with his family on a small lake in northern Vermont.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780826361318 |
| ISBN 10 | 0826361315 |
| Title | Crosscut |
| Author | Sean Prentiss |
| Series | Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | University of New Mexico Press |
| Year published | 2020-02-28 |
| Number of pages | 112 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |