Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm

"A moving, graceful elegy for the American farm." --Larry Zuckerman, author of The Potato

"Nonfiction literature of a high and lasting order . . . Clearing Land, [Brox's] third book, parlays the resonantly detailed specifics of life on her immigrant family's farm in Massachusetts into a larger consideration of the meaning of cleared land and its relationship to other iconic locations in the American landscape: wilderness, prairie, mountain, city. Her precise, eloquent prose, wedded to a sensibility that manages to be at once elegiac and hard-minded, strikes unerringly through sentiment and convention to the heart of the matter . . . The result is a deeply affecting conclusion to her trilogy of books about living the consequences of natural process, human desire and the shifting balance between them."
-Carlo Rotella, Chicago Tribune

"Sings with the joy of life . . . Brox knows farming, but she knows writing even better . . . Clearing Land is a treasure."
-Jules Wagman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Clearing land is the book's guiding metaphor, one that encompasses both time and space, and serves brilliantly to compare the material world and its flux with our attempts to understand it. . . This [Brox] does with eloquent melancholy."
-Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe

Jane Brox is the author of Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L. L. Winship/Pen New England Award, and Five Thousand Days Like This One, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Maine.

Though few of us now live close to the soil, the world we inhabit has been sculpted by our long national saga of settlement. At the heart of our identity lies the notion of the family farm, as shaped by European history and reshaped by the vast opportunities of the American continent. It also lies at the heart of Jane Brox's personal story—that of the granddaughter of immigrant New England farmers whose way of life she memorialized, to much acclaim, in her first two books.

Brox twines these two narratives, personal and historical, to explore the place of the family farm as it has evolved from the Pilgrims' brutal progress at Plymouth to the modern world, where much of our food is produced by industrial agriculture while the small farm is both marginalized and romanticized. In considering the place of the farm, she also looks at the rise of textile cities in America, which encroached not only upon farms and farmers but also, upon the sense of commonality that once sustained them, and she traces the transformation of the idea of wilderness—and its intricate connection to cultivation—which changed as our ties to the land loosened. Exploring these strands with neither judgment nor sentimentality, Brox arrives at something beyond a biography of the farm: a vivid depiction of the half-life it carries on in our collective imagination.

"In clear, detailed prose, Brox writes of her family's long connection to the farm purchased by her immigrant grandparents . . . and the struggle to keep it economically viable as younger family members moved away and neighboring lands began to revert to woods or be devoured by suburban housing . . . Throughout Clearing Land, Brox weaves primary source materials—the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Jefferson; journals kept by women who left the farm to work in the mills; lists of the contents of the ships that first came to the New World—creating 'voice-overs' to the narrative. Some of these interlocking passages have the rich feel of a well-produced film documentary, allowing various elements to reverberate together. Each type of text—intimate memoir, historical narrative, quoted source material—enhances the others . . . Her description of the way farm work overwhelms a family, increasing tensions, [is] astute."—Trish Crapo, The Women's Review of Books

"Clearing Land, [Brox's] third book, parlays the resonantly detailed specifics of life on her immigrant family's farm in Massachusetts into a larger consideration of the meaning of cleared land and its relationship to other iconic locations in the American landscape: wilderness, prairie, mountain, city. Her precise, eloquent prose, wedded to a sensibility that manages to be at once elegiac and hard-minded, strikes unerringly through sentiment and convention to the heart of the matter . . . Brox's double-charged language turns family drama into something bigger [in writing] so arresting that even the most urban reader feels the author's sense-memory as his own."—Carlo Rotella, Chicago Tribune

"Sings with the joy of life . . . Brox knows farming, but she knows writing even better . . . Clearing Land is a treasure."—Jules Wagman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Clearing land is the book's guiding metaphor, one that encompasses both time and space, and serves brilliantly to compare the material world and its flux with our attempts to understand it . . . This [Brox] does with eloquent melancholy, a melancholy sprung not only from loss but from impotence before the essential mutability of all things and the transience of understanding."—Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Sunday Globe

"This masterful college of memoir and history both explodes and reorders the mythos of the American family farm. Grounded in the experience of her own inherited farm in New England, the author plants words, ideas, and emotions with precision and daring."—Betty Fussell, author of My Kitchen Wars

"Jane Brox has written a moving, graceful elegy for the American farm by way of narrating what land has meant to her family and herself. Anyone interested in how land figures in our lives, our history, and our culture will want to read her clear-eyed take on this vital issue. A lonely book."—Larry Zuckerman, author of The Potato

Brox considers the farm's practical and symbolic roles in both American consciousness and her own family in this poetic rumination. 'In America,' she writes, 'not only do individual dreams have their origins in farming, the notion of the Republic is stowed there as well.' Telling the 'larger story of cultivation,' Brox gracefully moves between personal recollection and historical narrative. Her paternal grandparents-immigrants from Lebanon-acquired a small farm in the coastal hills north of Boston in 1901; it offered an escape from tenement living but isolated them from fellow Middle Eastern immigrants. Turning outward, Brox considers how, in earlier eras, the character of farms reconfigured the American landscape. The Pilgrims' fenced-in farms contrasted sharply with the open spaces in which Native Americans grew their crops; later, the need for building material in the burgeoning textile cities saw the coastal Northeast farmed for granite via deep stone quarries. And these days, she writes, the size of a farm can mean the difference between prosperity and failure, even as property taxes make land prohibitively expensive. Brox candidly reveals arguments between her father and brother over how to save their farm, as well as her own struggles to carve out a place for herself on it . . . Brox tells it with a clear, impassioned simplicity.”—Publishers Weekly