Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands

When William Harrison Brown (aka Bird) returns to the island of his youth, he attempts to take his place in the long line of landscape painters in his family. Bird, however, paints with a 1961 Underwood typewriter. A series of interlinked prose poems, HEAD OF ISLAND BEAUTIFICATION FOR THE RURAL OUTLANDS follows Bird as he attempts to make peace with his identity as a son, islander, and writer in a family of visual artists. The book is part history of grief, part exploration of ghosts and hauntings, part philosophy of landscape painting, and part meditation on the nature of islands.

An exciting new book out by Jefferson Navicky, author of ANTIQUE DENSITIES: MODERN PARABLES & OTHER EXPERIMENTS IN SHORT PROSE, which won the 2022 Maine Literary Book Award for Poetry, as well as two other hybrid works.

"Gorgeous and sweeping, lyrical yet grounding, Jefferson Navicky's words felt both otherworldly and at home in my head and heart as I was reading this de-licious book. As an artist and islander, I savored his story's whispered secrets on legacy and art, family and individuality, and consumed Navicky's bite-sized prose with delight and wonder." --Mira Ptacin, author of The In-Betweens

"Jefferson Navicky's work of fiction is many things: a frolicsome, inventive and thoughtful work of the imagination, a meditation on the vastness of a human life; and a poem that gives shape to human longing, regret, and the inevitable passage of time. Three generations of artists inhabit this large world, with their memories, visions, failures, and loves. The eighty-two short chapters are infused with the light and sound of the ocean--its changeability, its power and beauty." --Eleanor Morse, author of Margreete's Harbor

Poetry. Hybrid.

Jefferson Navicky is the author of Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose, which won the 2022 Maine Literary Book Award for Poetry, as well as the story collection, The Paper Coast and the poetic novel, The Book of Transparencies. He is the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection.