Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands
by Jefferson Navicky
February 2023
126 pages
$22 == Purchase from SPD
When William Harrison Brown (aka Bird) returns to the island of his youth, he attempts to take his place in the long line of landscape painters in his family. Bird, however, paints with a 1961 Underwood typewriter. A series of interlinked prose poems, HEAD OF ISLAND BEAUTIFICATION FOR THE RURAL OUTLANDS follows Bird as he attempts to make peace with his identity as a son, islander, and writer in a family of visual artists. The book is part history of grief, part exploration of ghosts and hauntings, part philosophy of landscape painting, and part meditation on the nature of islands.
An exciting new book out by Jefferson Navicky, author of ANTIQUE DENSITIES: MODERN PARABLES & OTHER EXPERIMENTS IN SHORT PROSE, which won the 2022 Maine Literary Book Award for Poetry, as well as two other hybrid works.
The Boston Sunday Globe calls Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands, “peculiar, beautiful, beguiling…There is good heat here, like the hot sauces Bird uses, and sauce serves as paint, as creative juice, as flavor enhancer, as ingredient uniter.”
"Innovative and incisive, lyrical and illuminating, Jefferson Navicky’s project inhabits the interior existences of artists and artmaking. This is a painterly-poetic narrative that burrows into the heart; that asks us to see and feel the intricacies of these lives, these imaginations, and our own."
— Myronn Hardy, author of Radioactive Starlings
"Gorgeous and sweeping, lyrical yet grounding, Jefferson Navicky's words felt both otherworldly and at home in my head and heart as I was reading this delicious book. As an artist and islander, I savored his story's whispered secrets on legacy and art, family and individuality, and consumed Navicky's bite-sized prose with delight and wonder."
— Mira Ptacin, author of The In-Betweens
“Jefferson Navicky’s work of fiction is many things: a frolicsome, inventive and thoughtful work of the imagination, a meditation on the vastness of a human life; and a poem that gives shape to human longing, regret, and the inevitable passage of time. Three generations of artists inhabit this large world, with their memories, visions, failures, and loves. The eighty-two short chapters are infused with the light and sound of the ocean—its changeability, its power and beauty.”
— Eleanor Morse, author of Margreete's Harbor