Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm

PRAISE for Clearing Land

“This masterful collage of memoir and history both explodes and reorders the mythos of the American family farm…. The author plants words, ideas, and emotions with precision and daring.”
– Betty Fussell

“Clearing Land…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 hears 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

“It takes discipline, discrimination, and genius, really, to elevate memory and a sense of loss to art. Two writers who achieved this spring instantly to mind, Joseph Roth and Joseph Brodsky, and to their company I would add Jane Brox….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 without 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

“Clearing Land, concisely (and exquisitely) written, is a personal paean to a particular love, and a loss, a benediction of the before, the now of farming, farm families, the future of farm acres…. With utter finesse Brox weaves the words on meaning of land use and land ownership into her narrative.”
– Hannah Merker, Maine Sunday Telegram