The Farmacist by Ashley Farmer
Ashley Farmer’s The Farmacist, the first book from Jellyfish Highway Press, came out yesterday. Christopher Kennedy’s blurb explains the book pretty well. He says, the book, “a meditation on the Facebook game, Farm Town, explores the realm where the ‘real’ world buffets the imagination,” and that it “is fiction crashing the lyric’s slumber party.” Nicely put.
At The Small Press Book Review, Christy Crutchfield wrote an awesome review of the book. She says, “Farmer infuses the serious with a good dose of humor – ‘Hit “Like” If You Love Your Mother’—and the writing is equal parts wit and terror translated through fine poetic prose.”
I got my copy yesterday. It’s a pocket-sized volume, perfect for reading in short bursts, but so engaging that you want to keep turning the pages for more. Is it really a novella, like the cover says? I guess it’s genre-busting enough to call it that. Justin Daugherty, who runs Jellyfish Highway, did a great job designing the book for elegance and readability. It makes me excited to see what’s next from his press. You can find out more about Jellyfish Highway and Ashley Farmer’s novella, The Farmacist, at their website.
Here’s an excerpt:
Gone to Waste
Purple hyacinths broadcast thirst: empty water droplets linger beside us. I materialize at the inn, beneath the severed heads of bucks to sip water standing up and watch pixilated ladies LOL and appear identical. I can’t tell myself apart any more than I might decipher how this town transmits me to me. There’s outside, and then there’s outside-outside: Saturday night at the reptile shop, the man beyond the Laundromat kicking a tree. These dreams aren’t even mine—I just idle in them. At the marketplace in the drunk of night, Dr. Doomsday’s demanding: are you lost or not? He means the opposite of friendship: he means economics. Just past midnight, I could beg a stranger home or hawk my crops, but I click myself into a tiny plot of rotting pumpkins only to identify the smooth, brown poverty as mine. A slab of river ends at my doorstep. No one I know knows how to move it.
Adam Robinson lives in Atlanta and runs Publishing Genius Press. He is the author of two poetry collections, Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say Poem.
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