Gracie is an average 16 year old girl that's just like you and me except the fact that her best friend in the world is a famous dancer and actor. Shh! Don't tell anyone though. When her parents died when she was just 4 years old due to a drunk driver, her godmother Melissa, and her parents best friends Jason and Rebecca Baylor take it upon themselves to raise her. Through the years the relationship between Gracie and Jason continues to grow stronger and stronger from the moment he taught her to dance. But will Gracie continue to dance when tragedy strikes?

This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time. A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson's slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California-with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn't wish for? A narrator's voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of "the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth."

Earth I didn't come here to make speeches. I didn't come here to make trouble. I didn't come here to be somebody's mother. I didn't come here to make friends. I didn't come here to teach. I didn't come here to drag the space heater from the house in summer with an extension cord out to the orchard because the peach trees we planted in a climate that couldn't take them didn't thrive, couldn't sweeten their fruit in a place like this. The death of a mother alters forever a family's story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all. The Accounts narrates the struggle to speak with any clear understanding in the wake of that loss. The title poem attempts three explanations of the departure of a life from the earth - a physical account, a psychological account, and a spiritual account. It is embedded in a long narrative sequence that tries to state plainly the facts of the last days of the mother's life, in a room that formerly housed a television, next to a California backyard. The visual focus of that sequence, a robin's nest, poised above the family home, sings in a kind of lament, giving its own version of ways we can see the transformation of the dying into the dead. In other poems, called "Arguments," two voices exchange uncertain truths about subjects as high as heaven and as low as crime. Grief is a problem that cannot be solved by thinking, but that doesn't stop the mind, which relentlessly carries on, trying in vain to settle its accounts. The death of a well-loved person creates a debt that can never be repaid. It reminds the living of our own psychological debts to each other, and to the dead. In this sense, the death of this particular mother and the transformation of this particular family are evocative of a greater struggle against any changing reality, and the loss of all beautiful and passing forms of order.

Gracie is an average 16 year old girl that's just like you and me except the fact that her best friend in the world is a famous dancer and actor. Shh! Don't tell anyone though. When her parents died when she was just 4 years old due to a drunk driver, her godmother Melissa, and her parents best friends Jason and Rebecca Baylor take it upon themselves to raise her. Through the years the relationship between Gracie and Jason continues to grow stronger and stronger from the moment he taught her to dance. But will Gracie continue to dance when tragedy strikes?