Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting [Hardcover]

Michael Perry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 21, 2009

From the acclaimed author of Population: 485 and Truck: A Love Story comes a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.

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. 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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Book Description

In over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and a baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Truck: A Love Story gives us a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.

Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety 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, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood—his city-bred parents took in more than a hundred foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm—for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.

And when his daughter Amy starts asking about God, Perry is called upon to answer questions for which he's not quite prepared. He muses on his upbringing in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect and weighs the long-lost faith of his childhood against the skeptical alternative ("You cannot toss your seven-year-old a copy of Being and Nothingness").

Whether Perry is recalling his childhood ("I first perceived my father as a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon") or what it's like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig ("two firsts in one day"), Coop is filled with the humor his readers have come to expect. But Perry 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.

Alternately hilarious, tender, and as real as pigs in mud, Coop is suffused with a contemporary desire to reconnect with the earth, with neighbors, with meaning . . . and with chickens.

Amazon Exclusive: Marshaling Memories by Mike Perry

In forming a recollection of that compelling moment when I laid my tongue upon a frozen hammerhead--an act some forty years past--I trust my memory completely. I give this trust based on the electric clarity with which I can resurrect the physical sensation of my taste buds tacking themselves to the subzero steel with a merciless subcellular crinkle. I see no need to verify this reminiscence by licking additional frozen hammers. Still, memory is a notoriously unreliable narrator, and therefore, whenever possible, I rummage around for verification. Sometimes it is as simple as calling Mom. When you took my brother Jud to the Frost-Top Drive-In on his first day with the family after the social worker dropped him off, did he (as I recall) really eat his hamburger, wrapper and all? He ate the wrapper, says Mom, but it was a hot dog. And so the correction is made.* In other instances the verification is archival. Seeming to remember that I experienced my first religious conversion after a spate of bad behavior in third grade, I traveled to the grade school of my childhood and was allowed to rummage through a box in the subterranean boiler room until I found my third grade report cards. The following excerpt served as evidence that yes, the third grade me was in need of spiritual improvement. Also, my third grade teacher wasn’t a top hand with the typewriter:

Student Attitude to Date: Work Habits: Continues to Waste Time. Mike appears to belligerent\when asked to get to work.

A mother's handwriting.	Welcome home.

In other cases we strive not for verification but elicitation. In looking at the first photo on the right I can recall what it was like to be a shirtless farm boy in the sun; the straw-like smell of the stubble and how it pricked the soles of my bare feet; and, out of the blue, an unexpected emotional wallop as I recognize my mother’s handwriting and realize that the evocation of a person hardly requires their likeness. Literal traces will do.

Sometimes--and I am not speaking here of fabrication--we must construct memories we never retained. Poorly-lit as it is, the secpnd photo tells me much about my world as it was on my third day of life: that my father was the type of man who would grab a sheet of discarded stock from the paper mill of his employment and fashion a sign to welcome his wife and firstborn son home from the hospital; that the big ship painting currently hanging upstairs in my parents farmhouse has been in the family since the beginning; and finally (this required close study until I made out the rocking chair in the shadows, and further realized that the two strips of shininess visible toward the right side of the piano were reflected from the gilded pages of two bibles), I was able to conjure the week-old me, safe in my mother’s arms, the Word of God close at hand, belief and unbelief yet to come.

*The question of Mom as unreliable narrator is not to be raised. Shame on you.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Perry (Population: 485) is that nowadays rare memoirist whose eccentric upbringing inspires him to humor and sympathetic insight instead of trauma mongering and self-pity. His latest essays chronicle a year on 37 acres of land with his wife, daughters and titular menagerie of livestock (who are fascinating, exasperating personalities in their own right). But these luminous pieces meander back to his childhood on the hardscrabble Wisconsin dairy farm where his parents, members of a tiny fundamentalist Christian sect, raised him and dozens of siblings and foster-siblings, many of them disabled. Perry's latter-day story is a lifestyle-farming comedy, as he juggles freelance writing assignments with the feedings, chores and construction projects that he hopes will lend him some mud-spattered authenticity. Woven through are tender, uncloying recollections of the homespun virtues of his family and community, from which sprout lessons on the labors and rewards of nurturance (and the occasional need to slaughter what you've nurtured). Perry writes vividly about rural life; peck at any sentence—One of the [chickens] stretches, one leg and one wing back in the manner of a ballet dancer warming up before the barre—and you'll find a poetic evocation of barnyard grace. Photos. (May)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harper (April 21, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061240435
• ISBN-13: 978-0061240430
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #590,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Perry has written for numerous publications, including Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, Salon, and the Utne Reader. A contributing editor to Men's Health, he lives in northern Wisconsin with his family.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written and inspiring rumination on family, change and what is important, April 21, 2009

By 

S. Scinta - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting (Hardcover)

Coop is one of the best books (and certainly the best memoir) I have read in many years, a perfect book for our difficult times. With humor and grace, Perry takes the reader along for a year of great changes, some positive and some devastating (I will spare the details so as not to ruin the reading experience), showing the reader that there is profundity and beauty in even the most mundane experiences of daily life. I found myself laughing and crying while reading this book, many times on the same page. In the end, what Perry achieves is not only a book about gratitude and reverence for the wonderful people and things we have in our lives, but also a pitch-perfect memoir for men and especially fathers and sons (not to say women and mothers won't love the book as well, because they will, given its universal message). This is a book that will inspire you to take stock of your life and make it a little better each day (while laughing along the way!), and if there is any justice in the publishing world, a book that will be recognized when various "best of" lists are compiled.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Perry is a Likable Host and Guide to Mid-Western Sensibility and the Intricacies and Rhythms of Rural Life, June 2, 2009

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting (Hardcover)

Michael Perry's new farm was not much like the one he grew up on. It didn't have sheep or cows --- in fact, it had no animals at all. It lacked the noise of a big family; there was just Perry and his wife, Anneliese, and young daughter Amy. But this small family had dreams of free-range chickens, a bountiful garden and fat pigs, and set out to make their newly acquired patch of Wisconsin land home. Perry chronicles their first year on the farm in his latest book, COOP.

In the course of the year, as they settled in to farm life, something Perry and his wife are both familiar with, the family finds small joys in watching chickens and enormous joys in the birth of their baby daughter. They suffer the loss of family members and dear friends, and work hard in homeschooling Amy, raising two pigs and maintaining the land. All the while Perry still works as a freelance writer, a job that takes him away from home more often than he'd like.

As much as Perry is writing about trying to build a home for his growing family and create a certain level of sustainability and self-sufficiency, he is also writing about his childhood and the Wisconsin farm that he himself lived on growing up. Raised by caring and open-hearted parents who were members of a little known, religiously conservative Protestant group, Perry was surrounded by siblings and family friends, and was expected to work hard on the farm. He and his wife hope to instill much of his parents' wisdom in their daughters, but they also have their own strong ideas about family and farming.

In attempting to find a balance between the two worldviews, Perry shares his thoughts, his successes (raising two healthy pigs for slaughter) and failures (a 50% chicken mortality rate), his moments of pride and his storms of frustration. While his life is not a typical middle-class existence, his hopes, fears, exasperations and jokes will resonate with readers from all different backgrounds.

Perry's memories of his parents, brothers, sisters and the foster children who lived with them are written with honesty and kindness. These are the same qualities that characterize his writing overall. From livestock auctions to home births, from coop building to funerals, Perry shines when documenting the everyday and has a talent for making the everyday extraordinary. His style is humorous but sometimes melancholy, bold and self-deprecating.

Though sometimes a bit repetitive and prone to too much skipping about in time, COOP is a fun and compelling read. Perry is a likable host and guide to mid-western sensibility and the intricacies and rhythms of rural life. In the first pages, he writes, "[W]e are going rural in the hope that we might become more self-sufficient in terms of firewood, an expanded garden, and perhaps a pair of pigs." But quickly after reading this, it becomes obvious that Perry and his family are embarking on a grander journey. They are exploring the concept of roots, literally and figuratively: examining the meaning of home, family and community with their hands in the soil tending to other kinds of growing things.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow: A book about chickens and pigs was this good!, May 3, 2009

By 

Mark C. Caserta "3r Blogging" (Brooklyn, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting (Hardcover)

Coop is a pretty chaotic memoir, at times, but I also found it to be warm, sometimes heartbreaking and educational. There are few books that have given me so much, without being some sort of self-help guide. I came away with a new appreciation for the small stuff in life, a new found reverence for my loved ones, more respect for animals and nature and a deeper understanding of the importance of being a good father. Oh, and Coop made me laugh a lot, as well!