The Silo 5
Queen-Anne's Lace 7
Fort-Da 8
Thistles 10
The Night My Mother 11
How a Calf Comes into the World 13
Lightning 15
Autumn's Velocity 16
The Brinkmeiers 19
Aerial Photograph, Glasser Farm, 1972 20
Dean 22
Coach Chance 24
The Man Accused of Fucking Horses 25
The Bait Shop 26
Memoir of My Imaginary Sister 27
Neon Apotheosis 28
Bingo 31
Stephenson County Fair in Wartime 33
Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970 34
Romeo and Juliet in the Tomb 35
The Battlefield 37
The Pit 39
The Man Who Poisoned Robert Johnson 40
Nazi Soldier with a Book in His Pants 41
Sharpener of Knives 43
Overlord 45
The Hotel 48
The Equation 50
Resonance 51
Postcards to Andrew Wyeth 52
Recollection 54
Letter to My Father Written in a Bar in Mitchell, South Dakota 55
On a Greyhound Bus in America 56
Mission 57
The Scythe 58
The Mummy in the Freeport Art Museum 59
Sirens 60
A Serious House on Serious Earth 61
Poem for Les, Homeless 63
Elegy for Missing Teeth 65
Directions for How to Use Crest Whitening Strips 66
The Trencher 68
Instructions for How to Put an Old Horse Down 71
The Key in the Stone 73
Wake 75
Notes 79
Acknowledgments 81

The "memorable" (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and "impressive" (Chicago Tribune) debut from a remarkable new voice in poetry
Almanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and raised, they are anything but merely regional. As the poems reflect on farm life, they open out to speak about childhood and death, the loss of tradition, the destruction of the natural world, and the severing of connections between people and the land.
This collection also reflects on a long poetic apprenticeship. Smith's father is a poet himself, and Almanac is in part a meditation about the responsibility of the poet, especially the young poet, when it falls to him to speak for what is vanishing. To quote another Illinois poet, Thomas James, Smith has attempted in this book to write poems "clear as the glass of wine / on [his] father's table every Christmas Eve." By turns exhilarating and disquieting, this is a remarkable debut from a distinctive new voice in American poetry.
From Almanac:
THE MUMMY IN THE FREEPORT ART MUSEUM
Austin Smith
Amongst the masterpieces of the small-town
Picassos and Van Goghs and photographs
of the rural poor and busts of dead Greeks
or the molds of busts donated by the Art
Institute of Chicago to this dying
town's little museum, there was a mummy,
a real mummy, laid out in a dim-lit
room by himself. I used to go
to the museum just to visit him, a pharaoh
who, expecting an afterlife
of beautiful virgins and infinite food
and all the riches and jewels
he'd enjoyed in earthly life,
must have wondered how the hell
he'd ended up in Freeport, Illinois.
And I used to go alone into that room
and stand beside his sarcophagus and say,
"My friend, I've asked myself the same thing."

Austin Smith was born in the rural Midwest. Most recently, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.