Still living in town

Poet Kevin FitzPatrick, while Still Living in Town, travels between urban and rural worlds when his partner, Tina, buys an eighty-acre farm and returns to her roots. His evolving observations, evocative imagery, and often wry humor explore a country life of raising chickens and sheep, as well as tending to dogs, cats, and horses. His perspective is at once pitch perfect and self-effacing as he details the ever-present physical labor involved in the rhythms of farm life: baling and stacking hay, planting, weeding, harvesting, making wine, shoveling wood chips, and clearing snow from the electric fence. Continuing to live and work in the Twin Cities where he grew up, FitzPatrick works overtime at an office job, pickets during a union strike, assists aging parents, and celebrates St. Patrick's Day. He experiences the ups and downs of both worlds and engages with the many various characters who intersect his life. Everyday events are sharply observed. Best of all, FitzPatrick's appreciation of the richness of difference as he traverses from city to country in these tightly structured, deceptively prosaic poems is laced through with a calm but delicious irony.