ISBN: 978-1-68313-156-4
82 pages
$13.97 in softcover
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Livestock Man
by Amy Hale Auker
Poems from a rebel heart.
These poems are love stories. Love stories to the land, to the past, to the present, to the
future, to animals, to tracks in the sand, to hidden seep springs in deep canyons, to witches
in the night, to wild grapes and longing, to campfires. But more than anything, they are love
stories about work.
See you at the barn
See you at the barn
is what you give me
as you turn left
and I turn right
along a ribbon of cedar posts and barbed wire
stretched tight.
Up and down canyons, across ridges,
I make crooked the straight
in deference to equine muscle
and slick rock.
And my brain plays traitor to my heart,
badgers me with
litanies and lists and ledgers,
calendars, costs and clocks,
tick tock.
All those things we have misnamed real.
I spur my horse faster.
But this rough ride can't be rushed,
and reality reclaims its right to what is
really real,
and thank God,
I can see again.
Praise for Livestock Man
These poems from Amy Hale Auker will dispel any notions of ranch life as escape. The hard
work of daily living rings through again and again. But also coming through is Auker's
intimacy with nature, seen in animals, vegetation, and weather in the sweeping openness
and isolation of the great outdoors. The reader opens to new awareness, to appreciation
of one woman's convictions, courage, diligence.
My recommendation? Read this book (even if poetry is not your preference) for its glimpse
into the realities of living and working in the vast outdoors: hardships and benefits
comingled with vivid insights.
~ Jazz Jaeschke at Story Circle Reviews www.storycirclebookreviews.org/reviews/livestockman.shtml
Brava, Amy Hale Auker! This beautifully crafted collection of poems is truly a landmark in
its depictions of the hardship, heartache, and beauty of working on a cattle ranch. She weaves
a thread of tenderness into the brutality of cowboying as a way of life, and pulls no punches,
while she shows you her skies, untainted by the lights of civilization.
~ J.A. Fisher, author of Girls from Centro
Amy Hale Auker combines her experience as a working cowboy with her love for language and writes
verse that tears down any fences one might try to put around cowboy poetry.
~ Andy Hedges, songster, reciter and storyteller
Books by
Amy Hale Auker
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Amy Hale Auker writes and thrives on a ranch in Arizona where she is having a love affair with rock,
mountains, piñon and juniper forests, the weather, and her songwriter husband who is also foreman of
the ranch.
She guides her readers to a place where the bats fly, lizards do pushups on the rocks, bears leave
barefoot prints in the dirt. Where hummingbirds do rain dances in August, spiders weave for their food,
and poetry is in the chrysalis and the cocoon.
She tells stories about the real world where things grow up out of the ground, where the miracle of life
happens over and over and over again, where people can and do survive without malls or Arby's.
Amy believes that what you put out there is what you get back, and that if you do the good, hard work you
will be rewarded.
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