Crosscut: Poems

Acclaim for Crosscut

About ​Crosscut
"Join Prentiss on his wilderness climb cutting a trail with five young people, each lugging not only their gear but also a life-destroying addiction. Prentiss leads us into the crew’s inner wildernesses. Near the end of their pilgrimage into clearing a way into themselves, Prentiss writes, ‘Four moons ago I barely knew/their stories. Now I might be able to enter/their dreams:’ Thanks to Prentiss we will all learn to ‘speak a language glued together/as much by sap gum as syntax.’" —Jack Ridl, author of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

"Sean Prentiss’s poems have the muscular strength of a Pulaski swing—contact with earth and stone and wood, carving a trail in the wilderness away from all that hurts us, telling the tale of a crew of teenagers “so recently lost.” What the poet finds in certain words--angle of repose, water bar, check dam, cut bank—will lead the reader into a contemplation of one’s own place under the constellations, dark all around, wet fire smoking. It’s “like learning language / through the song / of some new land,” and Prentiss claims that “Everything is conceived from rock & dirt.” His poems will make you believe it.". —Todd Davis, author of Native Species and Winterkill

“The world is strewn with nature poems, but too few of them feature blisters and sweat, as Sean Prentiss’s do. My favorite poems here center the tools integral to life on a trail crew—chainsaws cut through bullshit, mattocks churn up new ground. Reader, open yourself to diction as incantation: Pulaski, hitch, crosscut. Sapwood, rakers, snag.”—Christine Byl, author of Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods​

Artwork for Crosscut by Tim Calkins

Sean's Favorite Trail Building Books

Click to read about my five favorite trail-building books.
​Sean Prentiss takes readers into what it means to be a rookie trail-crew leader guiding a motley collection of at-risk teens for five months of backbreaking work in the Pacific Northwest. It is a world where the sounds of trail tools—Pulaskis, McLeods, and hazel hoes—filter into dreams and set the rhythm of each day. In this memoir-in-poems, Prentiss shares a music most of us will never experience, set to tools swung and sharpened, back-dropped by rain and snow and sun, as individuals transform into crew.

Book Reviews of Crosscut

The Oregonian. 
  • "Sean Prentiss is a Vermonter now, but his absorbing new memoir-in-poems looks back on his experience as the rookie leader of a trail crew in Oregon and Washington for the Eugene-based Northwest Youth Corps. In this collection, once-tangled lives – those of Prentiss’ and the teens entrusted to him – are sawed down to the bare necessities for labor in the wilderness: “Week by week we grow toward a condensed language. / Words disremembered, abandoned from tents & saw / packs. What use for the word sink?” It’s a testament to Prentiss’ telling that he stirs up a yearning to walk the trails and wield a Pulaski alongside him." Amy Wang, The Oregonian

Seven Days. 
  • "At what point does hard labor stop nurturing the body and mind and start harming them? What do people lose when they do their work at keyboards and experience nature primarily as "recreation"? With grace, power and humor, Crosscut makes us ask such questions as it reminds us of the power of sweat to transform our environments — and ourselves." Seven Days

Green Mountains Review
  • ​"Crosscut will teach you how your favorite wooded paths came to be. What tools were used to carve the steps up the incline, the primitive bridge over the stream. Prentiss will give you the small history of his crew, the people who we hope are still swinging Pulaskis, cutting new trails for us to walk, like the lines of these poems."

​​E: The Environmental Magazine
  • Click the link above to read an overview from E.

Split Rock Review
  • "Crosscut is so much about how life can be molded in a few short months of long days. Prentiss's poems remind you of the work of Gary Snyder and the harsh lives of the characters in Jack Driscoll's short stories. [... Prentiss'} language is crisp, spare, descriptive. Life pared down to its essentials." Robert Halleck
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Verbiage Magazine
  • ​This is the type of poetry that, were he still alive, Jim Harrison would likely have enjoyed. Those who enjoy his work would be well-advised to pick up this book.

Interviews about Crosscut

Audio/Video from Crosscut