This poetic book tells the heartfelt story of Jennie Hicks, a Nebraska pioneer and landscape painter. Through her paintings, Hicks captured imagined landscapes of mountains, lakes, and wildlife, contrasting with the harsh realities of pioneer life and the Great Depression that devastated her family’s farm. Selling her art for modest sums, Jennie was celebrated as a "Nebraska Grandma Moses," even earning recognition from Grandma Moses herself. Illustrated with Hicks’ evocative paintings, this book beautifully preserves the legacy of a forgotten artist and her place in history.

It took me a little while to get into these poems. But when I did, I felt I got to know the people the poet was writing about. The family stories put to verse. It was quiet and at times quietly rebellious. The people in his family came to life for me. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

Publishing date: 21.10.2022
Thank you to Netgalley and BooksGoSocial for the ARC. My opinions are my own.

I expected: A book with multiple artworks and poems written by the subject matter (Jennie Hicks)
I got: A book with a few artworks and free-form poems written by the great grandchild of Jennie
The book left me: Once again romanticizing pioneer life

Poetry style:
A combination of free-form and novella. It works well here, but the "poems" have a tendency to span up to three or four pages. I would classify this as a more lyrical book than a poetry collection.

Amount of poems: 16 poems, spanning a story of Jennie's life

Features:
Pioneer lifestyle and setting, a person lost and forgotten with time, 4 paintings by Jennie

Final ranking and star rating?
3 stars, C tier. This was a fine collection, one that I was mostly interested in because of the artworks featured. I got the artworks, but also a lyrical almost autobiography of Jennie's life. It was a nice and heartbreaking story at the same time, of a woman that could accomplish so much more. But because of the time and circumstances never got to reach her full potential.

Thank you Netgalley for the review copy.

The idea of this book is interesting, with a semi-poetic focus on the history of a few different but mostly connected families, often focusing on the women of the family and the things they do to survive. Jennie is actually in maybe half of the book, at best, unless you count the fact that a good portion of the narrative is also about her husband and kids and other descendants or neighbors. Humans are a collection of connections, but I don't necessarily see Jennie as a person in all of them.

It doesn't help that for all this is described as a book about Jennie and her paintings, there are very few of her actual paintings in the book. Maybe three at most.

While I do appreciate the land acknowledgement at the end, I think the way racism is handled in the book is a bit odd. I don't expect white pioneers in the US to care much about marginalized people of color, and the bits of racism we get being there are unsurprising. But it's peppered in so rarely and briefly that it's just... odd. I'm sure that would have made a less enjoyable book to share, and perhaps the family didn't allow it, but I can't imagine that Indigenous people and black people didn't play particularly big parts in Jennie and her family's lives on the frontier, particularly given the hired help of no particular ethnic description (who could have been white, but wasn't described at all). It's a gaping absence.

Overall, if you like historical looks at frontiers in the US and the history of families, it's definitely got that. Jennie's courtship with her husband is interesting, and the women of the family are interesting to read about. It's just too short, not really focused on Jennie at all, and the poetry isn't really good, either.

it is only a while yet
before I take my seat at the table
and pass on a tale.
from The Elk in the Glade by Bruce E. Whitacre

This brief book of poetry is the story of Jennie Hicks, a Nebraska pioneer and landscape painter.

Jennie Hick’s family “came out from Ohio betting on hope,” Whitacre pens, settling in Nebraska’s Hi-Line where they built a sod hut in 1888.

Whitacre heard the family’s stories growing up, now preserved in The Elk in the Glade, the title of Hick’s painting seen on the book cover. It is a heartfelt tale of a woman, a family, a place.

Hick’s romantic story reaches from the privations of pioneer days through the great changes of the 20th c. Although the Hi-Line’s “vast horizon” never changes, it was not the prairie that Hicks painted. She painted her recollections of the mountains and lakes she had once glimpsed from a train ride or exotic imagined places. She painted lions drinking from a river, a cabin dwarfed by towering mountains with a placid lake in the foreground, an elk stretching his neck, his cry echoing in the distant hills.

“The Great Depression devoured the Hi-Line,” Whitacre writes, “It chewed up banks. It swallowed the rain. It blew the soil into roving clouds. It pried loosed and rolled West anyone who wasn’t bolted to the plow.”

Tragic deaths forced the family to sell the farm, missing out on the rebounding of the land’s value later.

Jennie sold her paintings for a few dollars, her “Paintings hung in homes across the land, a Nebraska Grandma Moses.” In fact, after a newspaper wrote a story about her, Grandma Moses wrote to Jennie.

It is a moving story of a forgotten person and place.

The book is illustrated by Jennie’s paintings.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.