Whole Field Still Moving Inside It

The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It is a tour de force that returns us to our native roots, connected to the land, knowing the weft of our work, our food, our spinning nights of stars. Selected from 324 submissions to the annual Washington Prize competition, this manuscript climbed through the ranks, dazzling each reader in turn until it swept away the final judges. James Longenbach comments, "To say that Molly Bashaw has written a book inhabiting the most gritty details of farm life is like saying that Melville wrote the best-ever book about whaling: it's true, but the result of her inhabitation is not reportage but myth-making of the highest imaginative level. The poems feel simultaneously earth-bound and surreal, most convincingly worldly when their language is most exquisitely unhinged. Molly Bashaw is an artist of the American sublime: greet her at the beginning of a great career."