“In Tilling the Darkness, Susan Braley opens furrows—‘dark earth pelts’— into the past: her girlhood on a farm in Southern Ontario; her choices, or lack of choices, as a daughter in a large family and a young woman raised in the Catholic Church. Braley does not romanticize rural life or the histories she recounts; siblings, soldiers, students, stones—all are viewed with a scholar’s eye and drawn with a poet’s precision. Darkness is tilled here, but much more is turned over as seasons unfold, as fields are seeded, harvested, and seeded again, as blood seeps and stains, as elegy and requiem give way to reimagination and rebirth.”

—Laura Apol, author of A Fine Yellow Dust 

“Braley gets her hands dirty in Tilling the Darkness. She unearths a fierce, feminist voice as she wrests standing-ground for farm women and their stories. In the ‘mushroom dark,’ readers discover, with Braley, a slanted, beneficent, and necessary light.”

—Cornelia Hoogland, author of Cosmic Bowling, a collaboration with Ted Goodden

“Susan Braley’s beautiful inaugural collection is a celebration of life. In particular, the life of a daughter growing up on a mid-century farm in southern Ontario in a large religious family riddled with gendered expectations. The poems reveal the everyday and the extraordinary of farming life: its misfits, its sadnesses, brutalities, disappointments, and joys. And beyond. In strong, careful poetics, Braley conjures the cows afloat in the pasture, the barn burnt to its knees in the night, the ever-present milk, the breasts. And the babies, the babies, the babies. Her poetry tills the darkness with a clear shining light.”

—Arleen Paré, author of Time Out of Time

“Have you swum in grain? Dive into Tilling the Darkness and you’re in a hopper of kernels under the ‘thick gold rain’ of Braley’s engrained clarity. With swift, spare intensity, she depicts the bountiful legacy of her early rural life and later, how she navigated inequities of gender roles. Her Via Femminile series gives us images of ordinary women who survive discrimination and violence—and thrive. These finely made poems plow darkness to reveal ‘fire, earth, water, jewel.’”

—Jane Munro, author of False Creek