Jace had the prince in his hand and was seconds away from slaughtering the last member of the royal bloodline who had for so long oppressed or killed people like Jace. Now he had the power to stop it. Jace wanted to see the eyes of the prince as his soul was drained, but that's when he saw something-something different. In this boy's eyes he saw something that he used to see in himself. Jace dropped the prince, turned on his heel, and started to walk away. As he walked, the remaining blood of the slain swirled around him as its power entered him. He had to think. Something was wrong. He...

Almanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and raised, they are anything but merely regional. As the poems reflect on farm life, they open out to speak about childhood and death, the loss of tradition, the destruction of the natural world, and the severing of connections between people and the land.

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