Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm

“A moving graceful elegy for the American farm.” –Larry Zuckerman author of The Potato “Nonfiction literature of a high and lasting order . . . Clearing Land Broxs third book parlays the resonantly detailed specifics of life on her immigrant familys farm in Massachusetts into a larger consideration of the meaning of cleared land and its relationship to other iconic locations in the American landscape: wilderness prairie mountain city. Her precise eloquent prose wedded to a sensibility that manages to be at once elegiac and hard-minded strikes unerringly through sentiment and convention to the heart of the matter . . . The result is a deeply affecting conclusion to her trilogy of books about living the consequences of natural process human desire and the shifting balance between them.” -Carlo Rotella Chicago Tribune “Sings with the joy of life . . . Brox knows farming but she knows writing even better . . . Clearing Land is a treasure.” -Jules Wagman Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Clearing land is the books guiding metaphor one that encompasses both time and space and serves brilliantly to compare the material world and its flux with our attempts to understand it. . . This Brox does with eloquent melancholy.” -Katherine A. Powers The Boston Globe