The author, a novelist, describes his life as he and his wife moved to a farm in Vermont, becoming a goatherd and cheesemaker.

In a wind-battered Mayo cottage, playwright Jack Ferris tries to salvage something from his broken love affair with Catherine Adams. Drink and despair drove her away; can his imagination call her back? But as he summons up her past, Jack finds he has also called up Catherine's RUC father and a whole dangerous world of opposed traditions.

Acclaimed novelist Brad Kessler lived in New York City but longed for a life on the land where he could grow his own food. After years of searching for a home, he and his wife, photographer Dona Ann McAdams, found a mountain farmhouse on a dead-end road, with seventy-five acres of land. One day, when Dona returned home with fresh goat milk from a neighbor's farm, Kessler made a fresh chèvre, and their life changed forever. They decided to raise dairy goats and make cheese. Goat Song tells about what it's like to live intimately with animals who directly feed you. As Kessler begins to live the life of a herder -- learning how to care for and breed and birth goats -- he encounters the pastoral roots of so many aspects of Western culture. Kessler reflects on the history and literature of herding, and how our diet, our alphabet, our religions, poetry, and economy all grew out of a pastoralist milieu among hoofed animals. Kessler and his wife adapt to a life governed by their goats and the rhythm of the seasons. And their goats give back in immeasurable ways, as Kessler proves to be a remarkable cheesemaker, with his first tomme of goat cheese winning lavish praise from America's premier cheese restaurants. In the tradition of Thoreau's Walden and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Goat Song is both a spiritual quest and a compelling and beautiful chronicle of living by nature's rules.

The poems in James Najarian's debut collection are by turns tragic and mischievous, always with an exuberant attention to form. Najarian turns his caprine eye to the landscapes and history of Berks Country, Pennsylvania, and to the middle east of his extended Armenian family. These poems examine our bonds to the earth, to animals, to art and to desire. From "Goat Song" I start up in my wide suburban bed, patting the mattress, hoping they are real, and call the names that seem to be for strippers: Candy, Ceffie, Bambi, Serenade. Just as the names come out, I understand them decades--caprine generations--gone, leaving me only with a kind surmise: that somewhere their uncountable-great grandkids are cramming their mouths with rose and thistle, breaking out of other pastures, with some other boy. "In blank verse, free verse, stanzas and syllabics rhymed with delicate quirkiness, the poems of The Goat Songs are sure-footed and nimble."--A.E. Stallings, author of Olives and judge

Bill Grogan's pesky goat has been eating clothes and getting into lots of trouble. When Bill gets rid of him he ends up on a train with an engineer and a group of raucous barnyard animals and sets off on a great adventure. This hilarious story is written in verse.