Pig Years

Gaydos brings her experience farming, in particular breeding animals for slaughter, to a debut that’s in turns lyrical and brutal. Gaydos grew up wanting to work on a farm and quickly found after landing her first job in the field at age 18 that the life suited her. “Most years I don’t make it over the poverty line.... I could find a better-paying job if I wanted... this is the compensation for the crude work of training life into channels of fecundity.” She writes of raising animals and later slaughtering them, creating a thick sense of tension as her loving descriptions of raising “handsome” pigs give way to the revelation that, “At noon the next day we shoot them.” Indeed, Gaydos brings a realist view to her work: when killing chickens, for instance, she notes that it’s bad for beheaded birds to keep moving because doing so “could bruise the breast meat.” She’s similarly straightforward in relating emotionally fraught events, such as a miscarriage (“Working the New Lebanon farmer’s market that Sunday, I fully miscarry”). It all adds up to a powerful meditation on the cycle of life, “the flowering of the earth, its bloom and attendant rot.” This one will stick with readers long after the last page is turned. (June)