The Great Year takes place a few centuries from now as a handful of people journey from eastern Europe to Iceland after the world has been decimated by war and environmental collapse. As they go, and like a post-apocalyptic Canterbury Tales, the survivors take turns telling stories.
Told over the course of ten books, the stories the survivors tell take the form of poetry and song, while the details of their journey are told in prose. The poems range thematically across religion and folklore: love and war, feasting and drinking, creation and apocalypse, dreams and prophecies, and the rise and fall of cities and civilizations. Each survivor—two children, Dylan and Isabel, a woman named Bruriah, and two old friends, John and Smith—also have their own stories that are fleshed out along the way: all orphans in some way, and together they become one of the last families on earth.
Analogous to those ancient and medieval collections of poetry that are linked together with passages of prose, The Great Year re-centers poetry’s place as a carrier of narrative and history, and here it is given its most vivid setting: with humanity on the brink of extinction, stories are the last things we reach for.
The Great Year is currently seeking a publisher or agent. Contact me if you would like to see more.
Scroll below for those poems that have been published in text or audio form over the past six years:
The Brazen Head: 4 poems from The Great Year: Four Severed Head Songs
Forgotten Ground Regained: 2 poems from The Great Year: Ymir and Winter
Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle: War Song
Ritualwell: Miriam, The Water Waited, Ezekiel
The Basilisk Tree: 1 poem: Merlin
Amethyst: 1 poem: Viśvakarmān
Amethyst: “Jacob”
Jewish Journal: Moses, Bezalel, The Water Waited
