Almanac: A Murmuration

by Christine Gelineau

From the sanctuary of her one-hundred-and-twenty-acre horse farm in the upper Susquehanna River Valley, essayist and poet Christine Gelineau takes stock of what it means to care for a farm, a nation, a planet―a home―and of how the stories we tell impact our lives.

Decades into life on a Morgan horse farm in upstate New York, Almanac author Christine Gelineau focused on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and one another, about the planet we all share, and on how these narratives shape our own identities, our communities, and our attitudes and actions toward the environment. Framed by the seasons, Gelineau speaks to these vital conversations about what it can mean to be human in ways that are lyrical, practical, spiritual, and life-affirming. Almanac combines observations of iced-in alligators and newborn foals with prose poems evoking the natural world, gardening techniques learned from the Haudenosaunee, personal resilience in the face of long COVID and brain surgery, and urban versus rural perspectives on water rights and wind-turbine siting. It charts one person's journey into the inner and external worlds that will resonate with all readers dealing with these life-changing times.

172 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2025

About the author

Christine Gelineau’s book-length sequence APPETITE FOR THE DIVINE has just been published by Ashland Poetry Press as the Editor’s Choice in their McGovern series. She is also the author of REMORSELESS LOYALTY (Ashland Poetry Press, 2006), which was awarded the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, and which was subsequently nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Gelineau’s other books include two chapbooks from FootHills Publishing, North American Song Line (2001) and In the Greenwood World (2006), as well as French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets, an anthology she edited with Jack B. Bedell (Louisiana Literature Press, 2007). Gelineau’s poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, Connecticut Review, New Letters, The Iron Horse Review, Green Mountains Review, Georgia Review and others. Her poems have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her essay “Foal Watch” is cited as a “Notable Essay” in the 2004 Best American Essays while her essay “Cops” was the runner-up in the 2009 Florida Review Editors’ Award in Creative Nonfiction. Gelineau lives on a farm in upstate New York. She teaches at Binghamton University, where she is Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program and coordinator of the Readers’ Series. She also teaches poetry in the low-residency graduate writing program at Wilkes University.

Reviews

[Rebecca Olander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christine Gelineau’s memoir Almanac (SUNY Press, excelsior editions, 2025) is an elegy for self and planet that walks the reader through the seasons and is shaped with vignettes that are personal, political & poetic. This book is assembled as a collective as well as a collection of individual pieces - in the spirit of the murmuration captured in the subtitle. It holds so much with its stark and steady yet sweeping gaze, from horses and climate, to gardens and history, from health and farming, to language and water, from teaching and writing, to growing up and growing older. These stories, lyrically told, are often at their heart about how we tell, and who does the telling.