STOCK POND
By Justin Cox
Stock Pond catalogs ecological and social impacts of industrial agriculture in the rural and the remote. Riffing on necropastoral and visionary poetics, Stock Pond proposes a cottage corrosive portrait of country life. These poems are especially concerned with living-with-animals in landscapes of runoff and hedge.
Justin Cox is the author of Stock Pond (Bench Editions, 2025). His writing has appeared in Annulet, Chicago Review, Fence, Tagvverk, and elsewhere. Justin teaches at the University of Iowa and has been a fellow at the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand.
Praise
Stock Pond is an astonishing incantation in which words call forth the animals and ghosts we live among. Here is an ecopoetics for the western landscape of algo and algae, nature and nitrates that we’re damned and awed to wander. These poems follow the movement of fence and drought, bleached skull and flight, what’s cut down and remembered, human and sung. Justin Cox has an ear for music and reckoning, what it is to “learn to love from cattle country.” I am stunned by this book—how it’s both praise song and fucked inventory, of what’s been done, what persists. —Hilary Plum, author of Strawberry Fields
Stock Pond takes stock: of being and feeling, of dereliction and beauty, while these poems quietly compile to illuminate a bountiful abstract of country life: Earthen floor underfoot; animals free and animals corralled, their fates decided. Tethers and skin and “hooks run long / into the body.” These poems shimmer with marvelous recursive repetitions that dazzle and complicate everything as they range through the wilds of prairie and psyche, at rest in unrest. I haven’t read and reread a book of poems that has kept me in tatters like this in forever. —Nick Twemlow, author of Attributed to the Harrow Painter