DescriptionAs Robert Has writes in A Little Book on Form, the georgic—similar to how satire moves as vector toward the elegy—works as a tool through which we are able to bring ourselves toward ode. This collection of linked personal lyric essays explores themes of intergenerational violence, codes of masculinity, work ethic, rural community, opportunity, and the ways in which place influences identity, playing out against a backdrop of the rural Midwest, involving buffalo, severed thumbs, dead raccoons, mysterious neighbors, Eve’s Eden, and a baptistry. In a segmented form, Notes juxtaposes insights from research alongside vignettes of personal narrative in order to circle and illuminate their central questions, as if to surround is more sufficient than to impale. These notes work toward an associative clarity akin to Virgil, as if to work in pursuit of a contemporary georgic is to find oneself rapt, tethered in something edging toward the untenable— a terrible revelation, a love.