Amasa Speaker Factory

Amasa Speaker Factory wanders Michigan's Upper Peninsula with a mining helmet, a pickaxe, and a dizzying soundtrack. Chad Faries sifts through abandoned mines, family history, and the quiet damage of loving Iron County, Michigan--a place that keeps trying to break him. His poetry mines the U.P.'s economic decline, stubborn resilience, and awkward small-town rituals, balancing bleak humor with bruised affection. Both a personal autopsy and a regional love letter, Faries proves that identity, like iron, is forged under pressure and usually leaves a mess behind. "Amasa Speak Factory is a brilliant Book, a literature of roller rinks and huffy bikes and homegrown weed. Chad Faries explores a far-northern Midwest where wilderness has been decades reclaiming mine ruins, radio waves reach through decades as your sweet, tired town 'calls you home with a radio dial,' through speakers from those same years with voices that will grow with long grass between railroad ties." -- Jonathan Johnson, author of Pine "Brilliant and beguiling; this book is magnetic as the Yooper iron that binds it. As a U.P. rock opera, Amasa Speaker Factory is a tantalizing mindmeld memory--divine, devilish, hardscrabble, tumultuous reckoned life--pierced with the cold flames of youthful gains shredding loss. The heart skips less beats when we up and lose ourselves." -- Alison Adelle Hdge Coke, author of Look at This Blue CHAD FARIES is the author of two poetry collections, The Border Will Be Soon and The Book of Knowledge and the memoir Drive Me Out of My Mind. He divides his time between Iron River, Michigan and Thunderbolt, Georgia