Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. B. H. Fairchild's memory systems are the collective vision of America's despairing dreamers; failed baseball players, oil field laborers, a surrealist priest, college boys at a burlesque theater, the last remaining cast members of The Wizard of Oz. Looming over all is the fact and the mystery of our continued renewal.

Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Fairchild, B.H.

Poetry

W.W.Norton&Company

From Manhattan to the rural Midwest―one of our most distinguished poets offers a verbal cinema of America. Employing dramatic monologues, among other forms, Usher embraces a range of subject matter and modes, from the elegiac to the comic. At its heart, however, is the long poem “Trilogy,” consisting of three interrelated dramatic monologues spoken by a circus performer, a theological student and part-time usher, and Hart Crane.

Usher: Poems

“[B. H. Fairchild] is the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic.”―New York Times Gathering works from five of B. H. Fairchild's previous volumes stretching over thirty years, and adding twenty-six brilliant new poems, The Blue Buick showcases the career of a poet who represents "the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic" (New York Times). Fairchild's poetry covers a wide range, both geographically and intellectually, though it finds its center in the rural Midwest: in oilfields and dying small towns, in taverns, baseball fields, one-screen movie theaters, and skies "vast, mysterious, and bored." Ultimately, its cultural scope―where Mozart stands beside Patsy Cline, with Grunewald, Gödel, and Rothko only a subway ride from the Hollywood films of the 1950s―transcends region and decade to explore the relationship of memory to the imagination and the mysteries of time and being. And finally there is the character of Roy Eldridge Garcia, a machinist/poet/philosopher who sees in the landscape and silence of the high plains the held breath of the earth, "as if we haven't quite begun to exist. That coming into being still going on."
From the machine work elevated to high art that is the subject of The Arrival of the Future (1985) to the despairing dreamers of Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2002) to the panoramic, voice-driven structure of Usher (2009), Fairchild's work, "meaty, maximalist, driven by narrative, stakes out an American mythos" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times).
From "The Blue Buick:" A boy standing on a rig deck looks across the plains. A woman walks from a trailer to watch the setting sun. A man stands beside a lathe, lighting a cigar. Imagined or remembered, a girl in Normandy Sings across a sea, that something may remain.

The Blue Buick: New and Selected Poems

An early collection by the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Although many of the poems here unfold among the small towns, abandoned farms, and slate skies of the rural Midwest, their larger landscape is the sheer fact; geographical, psychological, metaphysical; of "absences like so many lighted windows as you walk through a strange city, wanting to fill them with imaginary lives and words and stories."

Local Knowledge: Poems

W.W.Norton

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. B. H. Fairchild's memory systems are the collective vision of America's despairing dreamers―failed baseball players, oil field laborers, a surrealist priest, college boys at a burlesque theater, the last remaining cast members of The Wizard of Oz. Looming over all is the fact and the mystery of our continued renewal.

"Meaty, maximalist, driven by narrative, [Fairchild] stakes out an American mythos."―David Ulin, Los Angeles Times From Manhattan to the rural Midwest―one of our most distinguished poets offers a verbal cinema of America. Employing dramatic monologues, among other forms, Usher embraces a range of subject matter and modes, from the elegiac to the comic. At its heart, however, is the long poem “Trilogy,” consisting of three interrelated dramatic monologues spoken by a circus performer, a theological student and part-time usher, and Hart Crane. A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2009.

United States

"Fairchild’s ability not only to choose a story but to pace it and to reveal its meaning through the unfolding of the narrative is probably unmatched in contemporary American poetry. The incisive psychology, the vividly descriptive diction, the large repertoire of vocabulary, the weightiness of his settings and plots: all these contribute to the delightful sensation that one is reading, simultaneously, the best poetry and best prose. I cannot think of another living poet capable of delivering such pleasure… Not since James Wright has there been a poet so skilled at representing the minds and imaginations of ordinary American working people.”—The Southern ReviewWith elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work… Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration.”—Anthony HechtIn an American culture which has always ignored or disdained class issues, Fairchild and Philip Levine are the only contemporary poets… who take work and the working class as their subjects… Almost throwbacks, like Steinbeck novels or Walker Evans photographs, Fairchild’s poems recover an America from which we have always turned our heads.”—PN Review (England)

The Arrival of the Future

Swallows Tale Pr

An Ordinary Life: Poems

A poet whose work is “a cause of celebration” (John Freeman, Boston Globe) reveals the extraordinary within the ordinary. 
In this stirring volume, award-winning poet B. H. Fairchild seeks the ironic, haunting presence imbuing each ordinary life with beauty, power, and meaning. By turns polyphonic and deeply personal, these poems range from Kansas highways and sunbaked baseball fields to secondhand memories of a World War II foxhole. They zoom in on a welder’s truck, a Walmart on Black Friday, and a record store, where a chance encounter offers radiant kindness in the face of grief. In a suite of prose poems written in the returning persona of the machinist and philosopher Roy Eldridge Garcia, “a watcher of things,” Fairchild finds sacred meaning in domestic scenes and expansive imagined narratives. Throughout, the poet evokes the brutal beauty of the American heartland, a morning’s “sheet-metal sky” and a grandfather’s farm, with its “dusty creek, damp / only when the winter wheat was bogged / in snow.” 
Elevating blue-collar work and scenes from small towns in clear-eyed, reverent poetry, Fairchild proves himself once again “the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic” (New York Times).

In this stirring volume, award-winning poet B. H. Fairchild seeks the ironic, haunting presence imbuing each ordinary life with beauty, power, and meaning. By turns polyphonic and deeply personal, these poems range from Kansas highways and sunbaked baseball fields to secondhand memories of a World War II foxhole. They zoom in on a welder's truck, a Walmart on Black Friday, and a record store, where a chance encounter offers radiant kindness in the face of grief. In a suite of prose poems written in the returning persona of the machinist and philosopher Roy Eldridge Garcia, "a watcher of things," Fairchild finds sacred meaning in domestic scenes and expansive imagined narratives. Throughout, the poet evokes the brutal beauty of the American heartland, a morning's "sheet-metal sky" and a grandfather's farm, with its "dusty creek, damp / only when the winter wheat was bogged / in snow." Elevating blue-collar work and scenes from small towns in clear-eyed, reverent poetry, Fairchild proves himself once again "the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic" (New York Times).

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fairchild, B.H.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Fairchild, B.H.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fairchild, B.H.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems

Usher: Poems

The Blue Buick: New and Selected Poems

Local Knowledge: Poems

Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems

Usher: Poems

The Blue Buick: New and Selected Poems

The Arrival of the Future

An Ordinary Life: Poems

An Ordinary Life: Poems