2014 | offset, letterpress
edition of 100
SELDOM REST is a series of poems that work in concert with original material as written by John Perry Hanna II between May 4, 1941 and May 7, 1942 in Diary of an Illinois Dairy Farmer 1941-1947. It is a contemporary distillation of the profundities of life’s seemingly mundane events, the ghost of rural life in the 1940s in Midwestern America. It is a conversation with history; a poetic reenactment of a way of life that we can only understand in fragments. As such, Hanna’s original entries have been fractured, edited, broken up, and synthesized in a purely poetic voice under my own influence, and in rare moments meld with my own new material. The fusing of the historic with the contemporary allows for a more cyclical understanding of history. Hanna speaks to me, and I speak back.
Made possible with support from the Caxton Club of Chicago.
$50 / limited edition with husk inclusion
$35 / standard edition
