Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting
Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting
Book Description
In over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and a baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Truck: A Love Story gives us a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.
Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood—his city-bred parents took in more than a hundred foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm—for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.
And when his daughter Amy starts asking about God, Perry is called upon to answer questions for which he’s not quite prepared. He muses on his upbringing in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect and weighs the long-lost faith of his childhood against the skeptical alternative (”You cannot toss your seven-year-old a copy of Being and Nothingness“).
Whether Perry is recalling his childhood (”I first perceived my father as a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon”) or what it’s like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig (”two firsts in one day”), Coop is filled with the humor his readers have come to expect. But Perry also writes from the quieter corners of his heart, chronicling experiences as joyful as the birth of his child and as devastating as the death of a dear friend.
Alternately hilarious, tender, and as real as pigs in mud, Coop is suffused with a contemporary desire to reconnect with the earth, with neighbors, with meaning . . . and with chickens.
Amazon Exclusive: Marshaling Memories by Mike Perry
In forming a recollection of that compelling moment when I laid my tongue upon a frozen hammerhead–an act some forty years past–I trust my memory completely. I give this trust based on the electric clarity with which I can resurrect the physical sensation of my taste buds tacking themselves to the subzero steel with a merciless subcellular crinkle. I see no need to verify this reminiscence by licking additional frozen hammers. Still, memory is a notoriously unreliable narrator, and therefore, whenever possible, I rummage around for verification. Sometimes it is as simple as calling Mom. When you took my brother Jud to the Frost-Top Drive-In on his first day with the family after the social worker dropped him off, did he (as I recall) really eat his hamburger, wrapper and all? He ate the wrapper, says Mom, but it was a hot dog. And so the correction is made.* In other instances the verification is archival. Seeming to remember that I experienced my first religious conversion after a spate of bad behavior in third grade, I traveled to the grade school of my childhood and was allowed to rummage through a box in the subterranean boiler room until I found my third grade report cards. The following excerpt served as evidence that yes, the third grade me was in need of spiritual improvement. Also, my third grade teacher wasn’t a top hand with the typewriter:
 |
| Student Attitude to Date: Work Habits: Continues to Waste Time. Mike appears to belligerent\when asked to get to work. |
 |
 |
| A mother’s handwriting. | Welcome home. |
In other cases we strive not for verification but elicitation. In looking at the first photo on the right I can recall what it was like to be a shirtless farm boy in the sun; the straw-like smell of the stubble and how it pricked the soles of my bare feet; and, out of the blue, an unexpected emotional wallop as I recognize my mother’s handwriting and realize that the evocation of a person hardly requires their likeness. Literal traces will do.
Sometimes–and I am not speaking here of fabrication–we must construct memories we never retained. Poorly-lit as it is, the secpnd photo tells me much about my world as it was on my third day of life: that my father was the type of man who would grab a sheet of discarded stock from the paper mill of his employment and fashion a sign to welcome his wife and firstborn son home from the hospital; that the big ship painting currently hanging upstairs in my parents farmhouse has been in the family since the beginning; and finally (this required close study until I made out the rocking chair in the shadows, and further realized that the two strips of shininess visible toward the right side of the piano were reflected from the gilded pages of two bibles), I was able to conjure the week-old me, safe in my mother’s arms, the Word of God close at hand, belief and unbelief yet to come.*The question of Mom as unreliable narrator is not to be raised. Shame on you.
In over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and a baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Truck: A Love Story gives us a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.
Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood—his city-bred parents took in more than a hundred foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm—for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.
And when his daughter Amy starts asking about God, Perry is called upon to answer questions for which he’s not quite prepared. He muses on his upbringing in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect and weighs the long-lost faith of his childhood against the skeptical alternative (”You cannot toss your seven-year-old a copy of Being and Nothingness“).
Whether Perry is recalling his childhood (”I first perceived my father as a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon”) or what it’s like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig (”two firsts in one day”), Coop is filled with the humor his readers have come to expect. But Perry also writes from the quieter corners of his heart, chronicling experiences as joyful as the birth of his child and as devastating as the death of a dear friend.
Alternately hilarious, tender, and as real as pigs in mud, Coop is suffused with a contemporary desire to reconnect with the earth, with neighbors, with meaning . . . and with chickens.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars If you worked on, grew up on, or are just interested in a farm
This book was given to me by my brother, and I had no high expectations because my brother knows the author (I live 1500 miles from my brother, and know none of his friends.) I found the writing to be fresh, his experiences matched many of my experiences, although I am of his parents generation, and he reintroduced me to many of my experiences on the farm 50 years ago. There was one huge downside. I am writing a memoir of my life on my parent’s farm, and upon reviewing my own literary efforts, decided that I had created a snapshot of each situation, while he had created a professional portrait, and my descriptions of grasses, smell of haymows, and the feelings I had at the end of a hard day’s work looked like doodles on a memo pad after reading this book.
5 Stars A pick not just for rural libraries, but for general interest collections located in urban areas, as well
COOP: A YEAR OF POULTRY, PIGS AND PARENTING is a lively read for any general lending library and tells of the author’s experiences on 37 acres of overgrown farmland with a handful of chickens and a pig pen. His experiences on the farm re-creating his childhood experiences makes for an outstanding story packed with drama, poultry-raising insights, and more and is a pick not just for rural libraries, but for general interest collections located in urban areas, as well.
5 Stars Pleasant simplicity-enjoying the simple things.
This book brings forth an honest look at what it takes to truely be happy with life. Although life throws us daunting tasks and experiences, it is important for us to take the time to see what the “real” meaning is behind those experiences/tasks. As a girl who lived in the country (much more the city compared to the author), I find myself missing that time and life. It is great to live those experiences through the author’s perspective. Well written. You feel like the author is your best friend and look over to see him sitting in your truck as you fly down the road with the windows down and the farm smell sticking to your hair. Then, you realize you are sitting on your couch in the city with a fan on! I recommend it to all who simply want to read a perspective-changing book.
5 Stars This is an understated masterpiece
Michael Perry has distilled a great deal of living into a few short books. His “Population 485″ grabbed me; he tells the day-to-day life stories of volunteer firefighters and Emergency Medical Technicians who serve rural America, and who often make the few minutes’ difference between life and death. Men and women who go about their daily business wearing a pager, which at a moment’s notice may call them from being a barber or butcher to being a lifesaving rescuer or to humping a rough heavy hose into a building to save someone’s home.
This book, “Coop”, takes you headlong into rural America. Seamlessly, he weaves the story of his present — returning to farm life and raising his little family — with stories of his past, growing up on his parents’ farm. For good measure, he throws in an endearing account of his own parents’ courtship and their selfless role as foster parents.
He tells about of his foster sister Rya, who had Down’s syndrome and a cardiac defect that was to prove fatal. His account of the last evening of her short life would bring tears to the eyes of a ceramic frog. It is the most powerful and evocative few pages of writing I’ve read.
I am an adopted son of the same part of the country he writes about, and our shared experiences — raking, baling and putting up hay, for instance — make reading his book feel the same as sitting around with an old friend having a beer and talking about days on the farm. But he infuses poetry into his descriptions: “Sisal [twine] that smelled of oil and Brazilian sun…”. What a visceral image that brings! That scene, a simple description of putting up a field of hay into bales for winter — took me back over the decades in a rush of memory.
Even if you’re a lifelong “city slicker”, you must have this book. Not from the library, no, it must be on your shelf. Breeze through it once, stopping only to catch your breath as you find you’ve read something profound in its simplicity. Dog-ear your favorite passages and go read them again. Slowly. See if you can figure out how he does it.
Michael Perry is certainly a reader’s writer, but he is a writer’s writer.
He’s one of the best we have, and this in my opinion is his finest work to date.
5 Stars Coop
I loved this book. You could picture yourself right there during his descriptions. His wife is a saint!
Filed under: Parenting Advice Book Reviews