Almanac: A Murmuration

From the sanctuary of her one-hundred-and-twenty-acre horse farm in the upper Susquehanna River Valley, essayist and poet Christine Gelineau takes stock of what it means to care for a farm, a nation, a planet--a home--and of how the stories we tell impact our lives.

Decades into life on a Morgan horse farm in upstate New York, Almanac author Christine Gelineau focused on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and one another, about the planet we all share, and on how these narratives shape our own identities, our communities, and our attitudes and actions toward the environment. Framed by the seasons, Gelineau speaks to these vital conversations about what it can mean to be human in ways that are lyrical, practical, spiritual, and life-affirming. Almanac combines observations of iced-in alligators and newborn foals with prose poems evoking the natural world, gardening techniques learned from the Haudenosaunee, personal resilience in the face of long COVID and brain surgery, and urban versus rural perspectives on water rights and wind-turbine siting. It charts one person's journey into the inner and external worlds that will resonate with all readers dealing with these life-changing times.