After the Floating Barn

Winner of the 2025 Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award
Volume 10 of the POPP Award Series

This collection of poems is a narrative, a folk tale, a ghost story, and a loose, speculative history of a strange few acres of land in Nebraska called Art Farm. We wrote it during a two-month-long artists’ residency in 2017.  

This book began as a sort of reply to an unpublished chapbook by Ben Clark and GennaRose Nethercott called, Dear Fox, Dear Barn. In that book, The Barn is a character. We began to dissect how the land of Art Farm Nebraska and its inhabitants interacted around that character. On the farm there are multiple structures in a constant state of renewal and decay. Throughout the summer and fall people live and work there, rebuilding and creating. In the winter the weather takes over. The raccoons take over. The ghosts come back. The story goes, sometime in the early 2000s, what would become The Floating Barn was being moved from another farm on huge steel I-beams. When they reached Art Farm, the barn started to shift. Instead of risking further damage they stopped moving and built a trailer-high post foundation beneath the I-beams and reinforced the damaged areas. The building seemed to float there above the prairie, dropping shingles and wall sections until it finally collapsed in a 2018 winter storm. One other structure mentioned directly in our book is a farmhouse built around 1910. Ben and I lived in that house with the mice and mosquitos and attic raccoons for two months. It was amazing.