Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past

Childhood is both heaven and hellish in this poetic memoir by Debra Di Blasi, who uses her grief and memory to reconstruct the eight hundred and eighty acres she grew up on. Her book, Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected past, is an ode to her grief at the loss of that childhood home, a farm in Missouri, and the twin losses of her sister and father. Part memoir, part poem, the two meet in a lyrical explosion of words and emotion that touches the heart and satisfies the word-palate. Not only does Di Blasi explore grief, but also the slippery nature of memory, examining it as she and her siblings examined rocks and birds and insects—inspected and decimated. This long lyric essay reads quickly and is beautifully rendered, at once gorgeous and heartbreaking. She examines nature and love and loss, never sentimental but always real. These mediations bring that placetime she speaks of to life, bringing the reader into this “place [she] happened to,” and helps us understand ourselves, our places, in different ways.