COOP

<p><strong>You can read Michael Perry's <em>Coop</em> as an outrageously funny comedy about a semi-hapless neophyte navigating the pitfalls (and pratfalls) of the farming life. Please do in fact. But scratch a little deeper past Perry's lusciously entertaining and epigrammatic prose his ultra-charming combo of Midwestern earnestness and serrated wit and you'll find a reflective sincere and surprisingly touching-at times even heart-cracking-story about a man struggling to put down roots. </strong>-- <strong>Jonathan Miles author of <em>Want Not</em></strong></p><p><strong>In over his head with two pigs a dozen chickens and a baby due any minute the acclaimed author of <em>Population: 485</em> gives us a humorous heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.</strong></p><p>Living in a ramshackle Wisconsin farmhouse--faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home--Michael Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood for clues to how to proceed as a farmer a husband and a father.</p><p>Whether he's remembering his younger days--when his city-bred parents took in sixty or so foster children while running a sheep and dairy farm--or describing what it's like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig Perry flourishes in his trademark humor. But he also writes from the quieter corners of his heart chronicling experiences as joyful as the birth of his child and as devastating as the death of a dear friend.</p>