Dale Cottingham’s collection, Midwest Hymns, reads as a meditation on a man’s journey through life’s myriad challenges, and healing through becoming one with nature and its cycles. Cottingham’s muse is the family and land that raised him, and each of these poems act as a patchwork in making an overall warm and nostalgic reading experience.
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With the open information attitude and international connectivity brought on by the Internet age, women are challenging what it means to be wife, mother, and daughter, raising their voices to share their stories and capture the imaginations of young girls internationally. Few express this better than Mary Woster Haug, author of Daughters of the Grasslands: A Memoir.
She claims that tradition and honor are the chains that bind girls to the same limited resources that their mothers and grandmothers have struggled with. In order for girls to fight these concepts, they must often turn against their own mothers, or feel as though they are: Not a battle for the faint of heart. Raised on the grasslands of North Dakota, Haug is a modern woman born from tradition. A self-proclaimed feminist, she tells of her personal evolution away from the values that buoyed her own mother, and Haug’s effort to escape the judgement she read so plainly in her mother’s features. Haug runs all the way to South Korea, taking a year-long professorship at the University in Daejeon. What she discovers is that mother-daughter conflicts are universal. Instead of escape, South Korea is more a harsh emersion into the tensions Haug never wanted to face.
Before the return of Rebekah Rainsford, Jack Selvedge’s world is as small as it is consistent. Jack has known little of the world but the hard hours and hopeless returns of his life as a dairy farmer on his grandfather’s farm; a craft that is dying along with Juniper Scrag, his time-forgotten hometown in the shadows of the Salt Lakes. Jack is a man of the land, dedicated to his dreams of inheriting the farm and carrying on his grandfather’s legacy of labor and sacrifice.
This theme of life and land presents itself throughout Braden Hepner’s debut novel. As time passes and generations turn over, the land that makes up the small, aging town of Juniper Scrag proves itself to be as present a character in the narrative as Blair Selvedge: Jack’s work-wrought grandfather. While life in Juniper Scrag has held steady in its decay, the effect of time begins to unravel, taking its toll on the land and its citizens. |
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