Almanac

Christine Gelineau is past Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University, State University of New York, and teaches creative nonfiction and poetry at the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University, a program she helped to found. She is the prize-winning author of three books of poetry, most recently Crave, and editor, with Jack B. Bedell, of the anthology French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets.

• AcknowledgmentsJanuaryFebruaryMarchAprilMayJuneJulyAugustSeptemberOctoberNovemberDecemberWorks Cited

"Almanac provides topical insight into Gelineau's artistic influences, but it most stands out for its sheer display of her varied writing registers. We see her poetry, her narrative, and her interactions with academic and literary sources. She gives us history, argument, reflection, celebration, condemnation, and elegy. In this sense, the book is a rich encapsulation of a writer's career … There is ultimately something here for everyone, and Gelineau's intimate unpacking of the collective blind spots our language and stories about nature have given us has important lessons to teach." — H-Net Reviews (H-Environment)"From January through December Gelineau gallops through pastures of plenty and plenty of problems: growing up with alcoholism, living with Long COVID, calibrating the calamities of climate change, and challenging the mythology of our national narratives to name a few. The severity and sprawl of what Gelineau tackles threatens to overtake her literary landscape, like the invasive vines of Rosa multiflora, but Gelineau is a gritty gardener. She clips/writes/lives through seasons of chaos and emerges with a steadfast determination to tell true stories … Portraying life's chaos in a concise manner is a literary feat. Christine Gelineau is a helluva writer, and Almanac is her masterpiece." — Hippocampus Magazine"Almanac: A Murmuration is, first and foremost, a wise woman's writings about place and origin stories." — Louisiana Literature"Christine Gelineau's powerful book of prose, Almanac: A Murmuration, is part memoir, part almanac of outer and inner weather, part early American history lesson, part environmental jeremiad, and part rage against the dying of the light." — North American Review"In Almanac, Christine Gelineau draws from a particular life, her own, different than mine or yours, but the differences fade to the margins of consciousness in the deeply felt connection she establishes with the reader. It's a connection based on her fidelity to what is, to the real feel of our living. She helps us hear the heartbeat under the noise, hers and ours. And the heartbeat of the horses that have accompanied her on her journey. Her love of horses opens on a love of the world and is the source of the many beauties of this book, and of the profound solace it provides." — Kevin Oderman, author of How Things Fit Together: Fifteen Essays, winner of the Bakeless Prize in Nonfiction"Personal, historical, philosophical, meticulously researched, Almanac weaves a mosaic of the changing seasons of a woman's life, the changing seasons on a farm, the changing awareness of our collective history, and the alarming changes we've wrought on our planet. I was grateful for Gelineau's intelligence and her prose that sings like poetry. But mostly I was grateful for the way she touched my heart again and again. I did not want this book to end." — Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys"I read Christine Gelineau's Almanac at a single sitting, enthralled by a book at once so capacious and so grounded, so intimate and so wise. Gelineau gets that 'history—personal, national, global, cosmic—is an artifact' made of language, and she registers history here at all those scales in finely honed, pitch-perfect language, but she also recognizes that nature 'is outside of language, ineluctably real,' and the birth of a foal in a cold April barn is as present here as challenges in her childhood and the colonial complications of the Americas and emergency brain surgery and climate catastrophe. Horses and humans alike take pleasure, Gelineau observes, in the 'sensation of meaning and order.' Art, she says, can offer that sensation. Her book, I say, does offer it." — H. L. Hix, author of over thirty books, including Chromatic, a finalist for the National Book Award