Selling the Farm

• Selling the Farm
• Price: $18.00
• Nonfiction/Memoir | Paperback
• Pages - 148
• Debra Di Blasi
• ISBN 978-1-949540-13-0
• September 15, 2020

C&R Press 2019 Non-fiction Award
Entropy Top Non-fiction Book of 2020-2021
Brevity Review
Heavy Feather Review
Hippocampus Magazine Review

The old house burnt to ash. Acres sold to strangers. So many dead…

Raised in a family of seven, in a small ramshackle farmhouse without plumbing, award-winning author Debra Di Blasi maps a candid and eloquent memoir of a Midwest childhood both land rich and dirt poor, both heaven and hell. Surrounded by creatures big and small, rolling fields and pastures, weedy lawn, deep woods and shimmering waters, she wrestles with the complexity of a crowded family shaped by place and doomed to tear itself apart. Selling the Farm explores the difficult intersection of grief and love, and the many contradictions in nature, life and death, and memory itself. Her lyrical recollections move from season to season with language visually and aurally shaped to reconsider the ways that we bear witness to any place and time—and to ourselves amid all. As personal and global extinctions loom in the foreground, and family farms become increasingly scarce, these elegiac ruminations remind us how much has been—and will be—lost to us all.

Reviews

“What gives this book substantial weight is that the author possesses both the intellectual and artistic urgency combined with the lived experience. It breaks through the compartmentalization which paralyzes our moment….Di Blasi is a powerful witness of this fact while totally eschewing a misplaced nostalgia. Selling the Farm is a work of rare sophistication, a source of beauty amid calamity.” –Charles Holdefer, Full-Stop Magazine

“Rhythmic and lyrical language is the medium through which Di Blasi uncovers the emotional cores of the seasons. The memoir blends poetry and prose in a way that makes you want to mark every line to revisit and unpack later. Some lines are feasts of images, drawn so clearly and layered so tightly that one clause reveals as much as an entire vignette” –Ariel M. Goldenthal, Hippocampus Magazine

“Selling the Farm, winner of C&R Press Nonfiction Award, defies traditional notions of genre…. This quiet experiment is emboldened by context because as a long-standing member of the small-press world, Di Blasi, an award-winning author of eight books, is like many successful small-press literary figures, especially women: celebrated yet largely unknown. Her choice to make the landscape the protagonist of her memoir is ironic, courageous, and bittersweet because it allows the artist to recede into her art.” –Aimee Parkison, Heavy Feather Review

“In Di Blasi’s hands, memoir is not a work of confession. As she writes in the prologue, she views autobiography as pretense—observing the past inevitably alters it, and any memoir that fails to recognize this fact is fiction….The book is a kind of extended meditation on the wonder of childhood, a phase unburdened by memory, when time is experienced ‘head-on.’… Marrying prose and poetry, Selling the Farm is the kind of book you want to read with a pen on your lap, to mark its slippery metaphors and juxtapositions. –Sarah Curtis, Brevity

Advanced Praise

“Debra Di Blasi’s extended lyric essay Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past is at once a sustained consideration of the strange and felt world of children, a meditation on time and ‘memory’s echo,’ and a profoundly moving elegy for a lost sister. It’s also an exercise in awe: at the natural world, where animals have ‘cut eons into black loam,’ and at the murky, distant, and too-often cruel world of adults. Above all else, Selling the Farm is an exploration of the placeness of childhood, which Di Blasi brings into focus with astonishing precision, intelligence, and complexity. For those who find in themselves a knee-jerk inclination to see the rural Midwest as merely flat and plain and simple, this book is a perfect, stunning corrective.”
—Wayne Miller, author of Post- and winner of the 2017 Rilke Prize

“Through dynamic layering of sound and syntax, lyric juxtaposition of scene, and agile engagement with the landscape of the page, Di Blasi captures the strange and unstable way that memory works and follows Walter Benjamin’s cue that a book should ‘either dissolve a genre or invent one.’ Owing much to Hopkins’ sprung rhythm, an activist sensibility, and a rollicking disruption and reanimation of memoir’s fundamentals, Selling the Farm—with its snapshots of fallow fields and water’s muddy haste and roar, flashes of childhood ghosts, lineages of grief, populations of sparrows, and meanwhiles of bee colony collapse—is an uprooted biography of place in the tempered un-space of time, a book through which the am-I-there of memory breaks open and reimagines the very genre of memoir.”
–EJ Colen, author of What Weaponry and The Green Condition

“God assigned Adam to name what he saw around him. For all we know, it may have been Eve, the first scientist, who took it on. In Selling the Farm Debra Di Blasi continues the tradition, gifting us a stirring and richly visual tapestry and language of Nature, observing and naming plants, animals, insects, worms, stones. She brings alive a kind of Eden for the five siblings, weighed against ‘the parents’ endless shouting inside the airless house’ and a father who ‘squandered his poetry in stubborn silence.’ With spare and minute details, Di Blasi manages to convey the full spectrum of feelings that color our relationship with family, and hers with Nature.”
—Tsipi Keller, author of Nadja on Nadja and The Prophet of Tenth Street

“Selling the Farm is a flashing flagellum of memory echo… a lyrical alchemy of the imago’s imagination distilled down to the ghost-critters of a phantom farm moldering into fungal loam… a translation of fear of fear unto fever visions so tangible they tantalize the lambent, pullulating, screeling diapasons of place in which ‘not a one of us has a map’… and there is no expiation beyond revision as ‘a measure of forgetting.’”
—Mark Spitzer, author of Investigative Creative Writing: Teaching and
Practice and In Search of Monster Fish: Angling for a Sustainable Planet