The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It

Poetry. THE WHOLE FIELD STILL MOVING INSIDE IT is a tour de force that returns us to our native roots: connected to the land, knowing the heft of our work, the souls in our food, the vitality of our history. Selected from 324 submissions to the annual Washington Prize competition, this is Bashaw's first book. James Longenbach says, To say that Molly Bashaw has written a book inhabiting the most gritty details of farm life is like saying that Melville wrote the best-ever book about whaling: it's true, but the result of her inhabitation is not reportage but myth-making of the highest imaginative level. The poems feel simultaneously earth-bound and surreal, most convincingly worldly when their language is most exquisitely unhinged. Molly Bashaw is an artist of the American sublime: greet her at the beginning of a great career. Lee Sharkey promises an intoxication with the physical substance of both language and the living earth. The further we read, the more deeply we understand her assertion that 'the farm is everywhere, a constellation.'