The Morrow Plots

For over twenty years I have lived and worked near the Morrow Plots, but it was not until I read “Matt Frank’s book that I really saw them. His book is an historical and personal record of a central Illinois landmark. He, much like William Carlos Williams, in “Paterson” brings to his vision, a poetry of acute awareness and accuracy. Frank’s poems are vigorous, penetrating, and moving. He employs a microscopic and telescopic perspective that allows us to examine an external and internal landscape with photographic and linguistic precision. The Morrow Plots is an important poetic work that dramatically evidences how estranged we can be from our own attentiveness.”

-Michael David Madonick

The cornfields of Matthew Frank’s The Morrow Plots are a centering point of our errant visions, violences and desires. They are oceanic; they are like the beating hearts of horses; they are a threshold crossing beyond which tractors become warships and the human heart performs and is subject to mortal experimentation. Within the agricultural history of Illinois’s experimental cornfields Frank discovers a dark and troubling landscape and writes about it with a quietly simmering anger, tenderness and beauty. This is an original and an unforgettable book.”

-Nancy Eimers