Grace Olmstead

This is what “living like a perennial” should look like: having an attitude of longevity and love that fights back against the consumerism of our age, and against that incessant internal voice that asks, petulantly, “How does this benefit me?”

Our health is therefore predicated on more than our own physical resilience. To be healthy, we must acknowledge—and love—the entire web of life we are part of.

Cassie Chambers’s Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains, like Smarsh’s Heartland, considers the dignity and resiliency of poor working-class families in this region of America.

This year marks the sesquicentennial of explorer Powell’s expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869. Perhaps more than any other man of his time, he comprehended the limits of Western geography, and suggested that inhabiting the land would require a far different set of rhythms than those we had cultivated up to that point. He questioned the entire orthodoxy shaping the West during his age—an orthodoxy that is shaping it still.

Seeds are the home of life, the promise of the future. They are the foundation of civilization and culture, the guarantor of full stomachs and secure governments. They are the quotidian miracle which prompt wonder in the writings of philosophers and theologians, essayists and poets.

This is a book about what it means to be poor. It is a book about what it means to be rural. And it is a book about what it means to be a woman. All three of those things, together, could have meant a very different life for Smarsh.