The FarmacistAshley Farmer. Jellyfish Highway Press, $10 paperback (80p)
ISBN: 978-0996782302
Like me, you may only know Farm Town as a Facebook app you
blocked the moment you got an invite.
But no prior knowledge is needed to lap up the irony, satire, and poetry
of Ashley Farmer’s novella The Farmacist. The book—which could just as easily be called
a novella-in-flash as a collection of prose poems—explores the pastoral and the
digital world. And
in turn, it explores a world of disconnection: “You flick a key and pixels
contract, the bright sample images more resonant than exact, more compelling
than fact, and all of it edited to the hilt.”
But 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.
The speaker laments, “I never thought my parents’ avatars would die.” In a world where, “Your body is 100% water
and 5% download error,” Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, the Devil, and the
reoccurring Dr. Doomsday and Aluminum Head visit Farm Town. And our speaker, planted in the real world—in
the bathroom, looking out the window—is always returning to the farm, which
“reminds me in the ribs the clocks changed for daylight savings, winter
greening into spring.”
In Farm Town, “You toil hungry and broke and harvest 10,000
mango trees only to discover they’re worth less than a single patch of
lavender. Your animals can’t breed or
reproduce and you can’t slaughter them.
They stand there purgatoried.
They wait to be moved by the electric current that is you.” But Farmer reminds us that in the real world,
we might find ourselves in a shitty bar in front of a game of Photohunt
playing, “addition or subtraction of body parts and black straps and wisps of
hair on naked women. I’m foolish but not
so easily fooled: in one photo she’s whole, in the other incomplete.”
I found myself laughing and shuddering and starting whole
passages over just to laugh and shudder again.
The first release from Jellyfish Highway, The Farmacist is a solid start for a promising press. (December
2015)
Purchase The Farmacist
HERE.
Reviewer bio: Christy Crutchfield is the author of the novel
How to Catch a Coyote. Her
work has appeared in Tin House, Mississippi
Review, Salt Hill Journal, Juked, and others. Visit her
at christycrutchfield.com
