Household Inventory

Connie Jordan Green has mined seventy years of steady and reverent observance of the exquisite intricacies of the daily, the absolute beauty of the mundane, the richness of earth and family, the poetry woven into the plainest of minutes. Here love is shaped by the familiar object, the common and almost invisible gesture, the sharp edges of what life hands us. From the "bins brim[ing] with onion bulbs" to "egg and sperm together...inventing mathematics" to "the wolf stretched on the hearth," Green gives order to the chaos of a "world that wants to be made perfect." In her "household inventory," Green shows how spent days drop poems like seeds in the fertile garden row of one's personal landscape. This volume is well worth the wait, its body "a receptacle filling, filling." -Darnell Arnoult, author of What Travels With UsIn Household Inventory, Connie Jordan Green gives an Appalachian Book of Hours. Prevalent in medieval times, the book of hours contains daily devotionals, hymns, lauds, and prayers for changing liturgical seasons. Household Inventory sings the praises of the land and its bounty. From odes on onions and blackberries to hymns to the seasons, incantations to herbs, and lauds to the household, Green takes us into the life lived simply and well-examined. This psalm to life and creation elevates and causes us to examine and celebrate the wonders beneath our feet and all about us. -Jane Hicks, author of Driving with the Dead