The Broken Country

As hostile natives and traitors within the Periapt forces threaten offworlders on Aquamarine, a secret cyber-personality, buried deep within one man's mind, could provide the key to communicating with a mysterious, sentient water-entity that controls the planet. Original.

C.L. Rawlins previous book, Sky's Witness, was praised by Jim Harrison for the "spaciousness of its thought and the antic wit of its style." Broken Country takes us back to the source: Wyoming's remote Salt River Range, where the author's life changed for good in the summer of 1973. Thus--with a rift between himself and his family, his heritage, and a nation at war--Rawlins begins a journey to the American interior. He takes to the high country with a team of horses, three dogs, and a friend named Mitchell Black to watch over a herd of sheep. And there he encounters not only a rugged landscape but his own mythic legacy: the frontier West. "To be found," he writes, "you must be lost or lose yourself...And to be whole, you must know that you are, or can be, or will be, broken." Here is fresh air, ferocious mirth and a hint of silent terror as Rawlins tackles the questions we long to ask of ourselves and our tangled world. As our reach entends to the vastness of the land, it also deepens to touch the mysteries of the heart. In Broken Country we find both storm and shelter as the author guides us to the place of understanding.

With In Broken Country, David Wagoner augments his reputation as ... a strong voice of the Midwest and Far West. A deep love and respect for nature pervade these poems. Wagoner writes movingly of the individual's resolve to master his own life. ... As Arthur Oberg has observed in Poetry magazine, "Increasingly, he comes to share, with poets like Frost and Roethke, a respect for the otherness of things which can never be fully known, yet which can be approached if we possess enough reverence and awe." ... --Atlantic Monthly Press.

For years Milo Talon had been riding the outlaw trail, looking for a man who had betrayed his family. Only Hank Rossiter wasn’t the man he had been: old now and blind, Rossiter was trying desperately to hold on to a small ranch to support his daughter, Barbara. Suddenly Talon found himself in the middle of a range war, siding with the man he’d marked for payback. But had Rossiter really changed? And could his daughter be trusted by either of them? For Milo, getting to the truth meant a long hard fight to separate his enemies from his friends—and forgiveness from revenge.

Food and the global agricultural system has become one of the defining public concerns of the twenty-first century. Ecological disorder and inequity is at the heart of our food system. This thoughtful and confronting book tells the story of how the development of modern agriculture promised ecological and social stability but instead descended into dysfunction. Contributing to knowledge in environmental, cultural and agricultural histories, it explores how people have tried to live in the aftermath of ‘ecological imperialism’. The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An environmental history journeys to the dry inland plains of Australia where European ideas and agricultural technologies clashed with a volatile and taunting country that resisted attempts to subdue and transform it for the supply of global markets. Its wide-ranging narrative puts gritty local detail in its global context to tell the story of how cultural anxieties about civilisation, population, and race, shaped agriculture in the twentieth century. It ranges from isolated experiment farms to nutrition science at the League of Nations, from local landholders to high profile moral crusaders, including an Australian apricot grower who met Franklin D. Roosevelt and almost fed the world. This book will be useful to undergraduates and postgraduates on courses examining international comparisons of nineteenth and twentieth century agriculture, and courses studying colonial development and settler societies. It will also appeal to food concerned general readers.

Hear me, for I am Ardneh! Ardneh, who rides the Elephant, who wields the lightning, who rends fortifications as the rushing passage of time consumes cheap cloth. You slay me in this avatar, but I live on in other human beings. I am Ardneh, and in the end I will slay thee, and thou wilt not live on. Hear me Ekuman. Neither by day nor by night will I slay thee. Neither with the blade nor with the bow. Neither with the edge of the hand . . . nor with the fist. Neither with the wet . . . nor with the dry. Ekuman strained to hear more, but the old lips had ceased to move. Now only the flicker of torchlight gave the illusion of life to the victim's face, as it did to the face of the dead torturer at his feet.

The Broken County explores the cultural and psychological effects of Vietnam on both Southeast Asian refugees and returning U.S. veterans. Rekdal examines the complicated ways in which we struggle to comprehend and memorialize the war.