Rust Belt Rising Almanac

Book excerpt: Fiction. Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Art. THE RUST BELT RISING ALMANAC is a collection of snapshots and stories from writers and artists in America's Rust Belt cities, published by The Head & The Hand Press in Philadelphia. In our first volume, you, Courteous Reader, will read about escapes, remains, and models of growth. You'll green your thumb with an industrial soil-strength planting guide, find a road map for wandering, and learn about projects that are working (and people who aren't). Our almanac may not serve as a strictly meteorological or agricultural guide, but we hope it will help to measure the kind of atmospheric pressure felt between jobs, between communities, between the friends who are still here and the ones not so lucky, bound together by a common question: what's next for the Rust Belt? "The volume is at turns cheeky and earnest, with such section titles as 'On Reverse Pioneering,' 'On the Anatomy of Coal-Fired Power Plant,' and 'On the Collective and the Communal.'"--Bonnie Tsui, The Atlantic Cities online magazine