Apocalypse Ranch

• Apocalypse Ranch
• Price: $14.95
• Tradepaper, 6x9, 90 pages
• ISBN 10: 1-936196-05-0
• ISBN 13: 978-1-936196-05-0
• August 2010

“Sara Burge’s Apocalypse Ranch delivers meaty narratives that burst through the starting gate and don’t let up. Here, the small-town worlds of hillbillies and horses, Black Angus and busted lips soothed with sips of Orange Cruch, are shaped into unrelenting song, a mean, rhythmic music that gallops down the page like Burge’s ‘pale horse,’ snorting and shaking, ‘hell-benet on pounding earth.'”
—Dorianne Laux, author of What We Carry

“Sara Burge is a funny, frank and fresh poet, an ‘oh no she didn’t’ writer, a witty and wise woman whose poems will entertain and enlighten you. Never preachy or pushy, her poems have definite impact–you’ll leave her work changed and wanting more. The poems of Apocalypse Ranch are as charged as atoms, quirky and quick and intellectually vigorous. This is a splendid first book that will leave you glad for this poet’s singular vision and terrific smarts. Sara Burge’s poems make you gasp in all the right ways.”
—Allison Joseph, author of My Father’s Kites

“Sara Burge’s debut volume is a real barn-burner. In the poems of Apocalypse Ranch, every word is written as if the human and animal lives of her native Missouri Ozarks depend upon it. With assiduous attention to detail, the ‘rotting houses’ and ‘broken farms’ of small-town America are given a realistic and often disturbing perspective. Burge’s voice is decidedly her own–unapologetic, hard as nails, divulging the shotgun suicides and drowned children of families who are up to their necks in a ‘Pomona Triangle’ of rusted engine blocks and ‘human insincerity.’ In poem after poem, Burge pushes away the psychological barriers we erect with self-delusion, idolatry, or neglect, and gives voice to difficult truths about the human condition.”

—Marcus Cafagna, author of The Broken World