Overview
A Times Literary Supplement and Globe and Mail Book of the Year
Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Canadian Non-Fiction Prize
“A wonderful meditation on farm life and by extension life itself … told intelligently and often humorously, by a writer with a welcome fresh sharp eye.”—Peter Matthiessen, author of Shadow Country and The Snow Leopard
In this new special edition of a beloved rural memoir, a farmer’s intimate bond with his land and animals reveals hard-won truths about trauma, endurance, and belonging.
From the straining of muscles at dawn chores to the last check of the animals under a darkening sky, Brian Brett brings readers along as he moves through a day on his farm, tending to animals, soil, and machinery while reckoning with the quiet weight of trauma that saturates the land.
Both an unflinching memoir and an irreverent natural history of the small mixed farm, Trauma Farm wanders backward and forward in time, from childhood chores to present scars, from ancient Babylonian planting cycles to the pressures of globalization. Brett lingers on the feel of earth in his hands, the steam of breath from cattle in winter, the small decisions that mean life or death for vulnerable creatures. Along the way, Brett reflects on the costs of such a life—the scars etched into bodies, the grief carried for animals and people lost, and the fierce bonds that hold a rural community together.
Meditating on the nature of care, the ethics of killing, the strange tenderness of routine, and the cycles of planting, harvest, and decay, the book balances raw realism with lyrical wonder. It offers a fierce critique of romanticized visions of the countryside while celebrating the miracles of birth, weather, and endurance that confront the farm every day.
Passionate, practical, and frequently hilarious, this is an unforgettable portrait of one farm and the people and animals who live there. Trauma Farm is a powerful reminder of our entanglement with the natural world, and of the quiet heroism required simply to go on.
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