Field Notes on Language and Kinship
Mormon Artists Group, 2013
Poems and essays
Includes original artworks by Susan Krueger-Barber
Available in paperback and a two-volume limited edition hardcover (paired w/Fire in the Pasture). Only three limited editions remaining.
Read more about the limited edition below.
Order from Amazon ⎪ $14.95 + shipping
Order signed copies ⎪ $20.00 (includes shipping)
Order Limited Edition ⎪ $100.00 (includes shipping)
After the publication of Fire in the Pasture, Mormon Artists Group approached Chadwick to write a book to answer a simple question: Why does poetry matter to you? He responded with Field Notes on Language and Kinship.
—Glen Nelson
Director, Mormon Artist’s Group
With Fire in the Pasture, Chadwick [gave] the entire Mormon community a rich gift. In Field Notes on Language and Kinship, [he] gives us yet another gift: a companion book of notes to Fire in the Pasture. These notes vary in length and genre. Sometimes the notes are original poems Chadwick composed while editing Fire in the Pasture. Before each of these poem-notes, Chadwick includes an introductory paragraph or so explaining the relationships between his poems and the poems in Fire in the Pasture. Chadwick is an excellent poet, and so these entries, for me, are particularly delightful to read.
The multigenre format of Field Notes on Language and Kinship opens the text to multiple ways of approaching it as a reader. You don’t have to restrict yourself to reading it from cover to cover. The format invites you to skim over sections, or just focus on the poetry if you want to. The book begs to be read differently, in pieces, not necessarily in order. However you choose to approach the text, I guarantee it will be a leavening experience.
—Dayna Patterson
Author, If Mother Braids a Waterfall
Review for Doves & Serpents
My expectation was that I would get Field Notes on Language and Kinship, read the book, enjoy the book, write a review of the book. No big deal.
What happened instead was that almost as soon as I started reading I had to break out a new notebook because his use of language forced me to engage in a more direct and visceral fashion, and by the end of my read I had about fifty poems that had not existed before.
This is the power of Tyler’s writing.
—Theric Jepson
Publisher of Esoteric Mormon Literature via Peculiar Pages
Review for the Association for Mormon Letters
(Theric riffs on Field Notes in his collection After Chadwick.
This book is incredibly dense philosophically and also textually. I had to look up at least a dozen words, I often had to read paragraphs a few times to fully understand what Chadwick was driving at. I had to read each poem multiple times until words and phrases spread out, began to leap out at me and open up a meaning, an image. But the work was worth it, because I think it helped me be a better writer and a better poet.
—Sarah Dunster
Poet and novelist
Review for A Motley Vision
Limited Edition
In addition to the paperback version, Field Notes on Language and Kinship released in a two-volume limited edition with Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets. Glen Nelson designed and hand bound Field Notes and rebound Fire in the Pasture in hardcover. The two works are bound in silk and hand-pounded amate barkskin paper made by Otomi Indians of Mexico. The books are presented in a slipcase covered in brown Asahi silk from Japan and were published in a limited edition of 25 copies, signed and numbered by the artists.
Field Notes includes eight artworks created especially for this project by Susan Krueger-Barber. Just as the book brings multiple disciplines of literature to bear, Krueger-Barber’s artworks are multi-disciplinary, mixed media works. Each of them combines photography, painting, and collage (using fragments torn from a copy of Fire in the Pasture). For the limited edition volume, the artworks were digitally scanned, reproduced, and bound into the book.
I have three (3) copies of the limited edition available for purchase.