COUNTRY MUSIC – Chelsea Harlan
COUNTRY MUSIC – Chelsea Harlan
COUNTRY MUSIC
by Chelsea Harlan
(037)
NOTE: A second printing is coming in the first half of 2023! If you are interested in this title, please email twoplumpress@gmail.com to express that interest! We just need to reprint dust jackets. Finding studio time is a hurdle, but every nudge helps!
This is not a book about country music, at least not the genre as you know it. Though some of it sort of is– there are noteworthy country songs referenced, an accompanying playlist– but to me there is something else this book does which is uncommon and utterly magical. I think it is a book that does for poetry (broad brushstroke there) what that one dusty Lester Watt and Earl Scruggs Songs to Cherish vinyl LP did for me– or maybe it was the endlessly looping iPod collection of Carter Family songs playing during youthful garden work parties– or maybe it was the dear roommate who showed me the way to Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris in our hot summer kitchen, feeling the breeze blow through my hair– for my experience, as a feeling and thinking human, of “country music.” Country Music, the music. Country Music, the feeling. Country Music, the wavelength. Country Music by Chelsea Harlan is a book of poems that makes me think and feel in a new way about poetry, about my life, about the earth under my feet, the trees planted in the yard, the neglected house down the block, the faded sign on the side of the road, the lost taste of the season’s first perfect peach and the certainly-coming-but-not-not-yet last taste of the garden tomatoes.
If I could prescribe it to all of you, I would. Like, if you have existential malaise, try reading Country Music. If you are having the time of your freaking life, read Country Music and send it to the stratosphere. If you live in the city and want to hear the cicadas and see the dang moon, read Country Music. If you are living simply in the country but remember the kinetic energy and twinkling lights of other towns, read Country Music. Are you in love, or have you been, with a person or a place or a thing? Do you even begin to think about the layers of that love? Read Country Music, it might help. Perhaps consider adding the book to your life in the same casual/everyday way that coffee helps you start the day and a whiskey on the rocks maybe ends it. Take it in after lunch instead of a nap; it will restore you in the same way. Add reading the book to your day like you might add watching a movie or taking a walk. Let this book be the potato chips to your picnic sandwich. Country Music is here to enrich your experience of being in the world.
Some of these poems have previously appeared in these lovely places: Southwest Review, Pouch, The Boiler, The Greensboro Review, Raleigh Review, and Voicemail Poems.
Find the official Country Music playlist here. An accompanying mixtape is coming soon!
(excerpt)
I Have Yet More Esotericism to Share
At the Santa Cruz Public Storage sharing a too-hard persimmon
I hate what we’ve gone through
but I love that we’ve gone through it
But where was all the wildlife?
Why is the werewolf shirtless all the time? When danger takes you by the ankles you slip out of your socks like aha
My Neighbor Says His Friend Says
If you drink too much Gatorade you die.
I say wow, do you think that’s true?
and he shrugs and says he likes the reds and oranges.
His little brother gives me a dried pear from a brown paper bag.
Then they run back down the road to their house.
Then the planet keeps on spinning on its spindly tilted axis And the next day when they’re done with Zoom school They give me a painting of a dragon with two mouths.
I say wow, I see the two mouths!
And we sit outside and watch the butterflies flitter and
just as I’d begun to mourn certainty itself, the little brother says, Those aren’t butterflies, they’re cabbage moths.
from Country Song:
The air mauve with dust over the wash... A few witching hours’ rest
sleeping without dreaming of anything
in particular. Blissfully hot coffee.
100, easy, through Arizona. Ambidextrous saguaros at the Circle K.
Roadkill jack rabbit makes me sad but what doesn’t, really. So it goes: pinyons, juniper flats, kangaroo rats.
Another lit Walmart parking lot, another guy with an electric guitar entertaining shoppers and the void.
Born and raised in Appalachia, Chelsea Harlan holds a BA in Literature and Visual Art from Bennington College, as well as an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Sixth Finch, SAND, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, and her chapbook Mummy, written in collaboration with London-based painter Daisy Parris, was released by Montez Press in 2019. She received the 2019-2020 Mikrokosmos Poetry Prize for her poem “Grimaldo’s Chair,” selected by sam sax, as well as the 2021 Robert Watson Literary Award from The Greensboro Review for her poem “Some Sunlight.” She lives in the Blue Ridge, where she’s at work on a full-length manuscript.