Written as an ode-elegy to Becca’s family’s 1840s dairy farm in Ohio, this poetry collection includes a “pie poem series” based on her maternal grandmother and a series imagining what St. Francis might be doing today if he lived in our current world. It is dedicated to the poet’s mother, who became a Mennonite pastor at age 60.

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What if our concept of the soul was more verb than noun? What if we thought of the effort to make meaning in our world as the soul’s central work? These poems show us a woman sifting through memories of her Mennonite upbringing, and weighing carefully her somewhat more secular adult experience. In the end, she finds the authentic, whether inside a religious tradition or not, most present in our universal, ongoing struggle to love and thereby affirm the existence of one another. For Lachman, that is how the soul reveals itself, and, to borrow a phrase from Keats, Other Acreage is her book of “soul-making.” 

-Fred Marchant
Author of The Looking House (Graywolf Press)

"I have seen things shine," the speaker announces. But where does illumination come from, the future or the past?  Through narratives richly embedded with lists, litanies, recipes, liminal moments, and cameo appearances of St. Francis, the poems in this collection investigate the nature of change. From the perspective of the poet's soul, time is both linear and cyclical, "so you can/ plant something there and it keeps coming back—/even if it's in strange ground."

-Claire Bateman
Author of Coronology and Other Poems (Etruscan Press)