Shit Hike

A droll yet earnest collection of poems that grapple with Garnett's transition into a pastoral, domestic midlife and, more broadly, with the nature of change itself

A walking poet, Callie Garnett often composes poems while out on a tramp, but this newlywed's current hike brings about a dramatic change of scenery―from a media-centric city life to an unkempt plot of countryside that must, like her life itself, be husbanded. After the honeymoon that opens this book, the unspoken "what next?" begins to blare loudly. This turn of the plow could unearth motherhood but, in Garnett's case, it turns up something else. Channeling this poet's keen mind, churning with midlife's thorniest dilemmas, Shit Hike traipses through wildly incongruous modes, turning on a dime between the pastoral and the peeving, acceptance and resistance, through both comedy and loss. The result is a thrilling journey into the thoughts and feelings of Garnett's exploration through these new unpaved fields.
Callie Garnett (born 1983) is the author of the poetry collection Wings in Time (The Song Cave, 2021), a New York Times best poetry book of the year, and the chapbooks On Knowingness (The Song Cave, 2017) and Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (Ugly Duckling, 2015). She works as Editorial Director of Fiction and Memoir at Bloomsbury Publishing (US), and lives in Esopus, NY.