Tilling the Darkness
Tilling the Darkness
Dawn Macdonald
, Jill Handrigan
, Barry Kazimer
, Sarah Schwartz
, Linda Leitch
, Jude Castillo
, Marilyn Stanley
, Cassandra Schiemann
, Laney Gomes
, Natasa Ilic
, Deb Philippon
, Grace Novack
, Andrea Pole
, Celina Glesmann
, Noelle Walsh
, Melissa Poremba
, PATRICIA SOPEL
, Dani Kat
, LJ Law
, Lynn Andrews
, Andrea Gillespie
, Margo Beredjiklian
, Kim Cappellina
, Karen Kendrick
, Sara Conway
, Pamela Roberts Griffith
, Benita Hartwell
, Randi Ann Doll
, Candace Fertile
, Rachel Edmonds
, diana kirkwood
, Robert Hykawy
, PETER TASSIOPOULOS
, Donald Forsythe
, BJ Underwood
, Trish Bowering
, Karen Reid
, Joanne Epp
, Nora Gould
, Lynn Bechtel
, Janice Cournoyer
, Maria Mclean
, Karen Nordrum
, Alex Henderson
, Amanda Schempp
, Mary Lester
, Susan Jang
, Gwynn Scheltema
, Joshua Lewis
, Joe Mitchell
, P. Thompson
editor@49thShelf.com
In Susan Braley’s debut poetry collection, Tilling the Darkness, a young woman born into a family of eleven navigates the inequities of gender roles on the farm and in the church. In this dramatic rural setting—birth and death sudden in the barn, the seasons vivid over the fields—she experiences first-hand how swiftly seedlings become stalks ploughed down, how easily she and her sisters are discounted. Tilling the Darkness explores how we all undertake this tilling ritual, season after season, in the finite field of our lives. Our darkness may be a calamity we seek to escape—a grave, a war, a grief—and our wish is the promise of renewal. In these powerful poems, it is often women who, even in the face of injury and erasure, turn dark to light. Braley’s poetry traces how this woman, after leaving the farm, comes to appreciate the complex, bountiful legacy of her early life.
