Here and Nowhere Else
Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family

Winner of the 1996 L. L. Winship / PEN New England Award
Beacon Press 1995
Paperback: 1996
Second paperback edition: North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2004
After years of living away Jane Brox made the decision to return to the family farm of her birth, where her aging father still tended the crops. In this striking memoir of her reintroduction to the land and its habits, Brox captures the cadences of farm life and those who sustain it, at a time when the viability of both are waning.
PRAISE for Here and Nowhere Else
“A loving, precisely written evocation of a New England place and its people….reminiscent of Thoreau in its exactness and breadth of implications.”
– from the judges’ citation, L. L. Winship / PEN New England Award.
“A poignant account of return and recommitment….Brox describes crisply yet with great feeling.”
– Maxine Kumin, New York Times Book Review
“Arresting. With a poet’s sensibility and an essayist’s search for meaning, Brox gives us keen and sensuous observations of the land….with compassion, honesty, and restraint.”
– The Boston Globe
“A strangely joyful book. Brox looks hard at what she sees, breaks down the minute workings…. No object, however humble, is unworthy of the slow craft and mindfulness of her regard…. [She] finds the image that makes the match, invests the thing with rightful singularity. And implicit in the quality of her attention is a plea for patience, for the need to see the thing in the context of the time in which it lives.”
– Amy Godine, Orion
“A beautifully written tribute to the family farm.”
– Publisher’s Weekly
“[Brox} forges compelling narrative from the workaday…. This slim book’s surprising strength accrues line by line in Brox’s keen observation and spare, poetic prose.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“Brox subordinates dramas of personal longing and disappointment to the longer, larger story of an ancient vocation playing itself out between the implacabilities of nature on the one side and the American present on the other.”
– Franklin Burroughs, The Southern Review
“This is a book that quietly, insistently speaks to love of land… Through Brox’s… sensitive and powerful language, the reader celebrates but also mourns what seems the inevitable passing of a way of life that… is rooted in the knowledge of growing things and the secrets of the land.”
– Daphne Abeel, Harvard Review
PURCHASE ONLINE
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Or locally in Maine from:
Gulf of Maine Books
134 Maine Street
Brunswick, Maine
207-729-5083
REVIEWS
New York Times Book Review, August 6, 1995
The Boston Globe, June 1995
The Southern Review, Fall 1995
Harvard Review, Spring 1996
Orion Magazine, Winter 1996
Publishers Weekly, May 1995
Kirkus Reviews, May 1995