Almanac

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.

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.

Christine Gelineau is past Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University, State University of New York, and teaches creative nonfiction and poetry at the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University, a program she helped to found. She is the prize-winning author of three books of poetry, most recently Crave, and editor, with Jack B. Bedell, of the anthology French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets.

Christine Gelineau is past Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University, State University of New York, and teaches creative nonfiction and poetry at the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University, a program she helped to found. She is the prize-winning author of three books of poetry, most recently Crave, and editor, with Jack B. Bedell, of the anthology French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets.

"In Almanac, Christine Gelineau draws from a particular life, her own, different than mine or yours, but the differences fade to the margins of consciousness in the deeply felt connection she establishes with the reader. It's a connection based on her fidelity to what is, to the real feel of our living. She helps us hear the heartbeat under the noise, hers and ours. And the heartbeat of the horses that have accompanied her on her journey. Her love of horses opens on a love of the world and is the source of the many beauties of this book, and of the profound solace it provides." — Kevin Oderman, author of How Things Fit Together: Fifteen Essays, winner of the Bakeless Prize in Nonfiction

"Personal, historical, philosophical, meticulously researched, Almanac weaves a mosaic of the changing seasons of a woman's life, the changing seasons on a farm, the changing awareness of our collective history, and the alarming changes we've wrought on our planet. I was grateful for Gelineau's intelligence and her prose that sings like poetry. But mostly I was grateful for the way she touched my heart again and again. I did not want this book to end." — Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys

"I read Christine Gelineau's Almanac at a single sitting, enthralled by a book at once so capacious and so grounded, so intimate and so wise. Gelineau gets that 'history—personal, national, global, cosmic—is an artifact' made of language, and she registers history here at all those scales in finely honed, pitch-perfect language, but she also recognizes that nature 'is outside of language, ineluctably real,' and the birth of a foal in a cold April barn is as present here as challenges in her childhood and the colonial complications of the Americas and emergency brain surgery and climate catastrophe. Horses and humans alike take pleasure, Gelineau observes, in the 'sensation of meaning and order.' Art, she says, can offer that sensation. Her book, I say, does offer it." — H. L. Hix, author of over thirty books, including Chromatic, a finalist for the National Book Award