Ain't Country Like You by Abigail Carl-Klassen

Winner of the 2019 Digging Press Chapbook Series Award, Abigail Carl-Klassen depicts rural spaces inhabited by a community dependent on the boom and bust cycles of oil fields and cash crop agriculture. The personal and confrontational voices in these eighteen poems, embody the constant tension of political rhetoric and social vulnerability in contemporary America. Unapologetically tender and with a hopeful nod to an elusive American ideal, these poems imbue a nation's struggles with culture, class, and identity.

The Digging Press Chapbook Series features pocket-sized books of 40 to 60 pages, perfect bound with square spines, as well as, original cover art and layout design. 

Photography by Alayna Klassen. Cover and layout design by Cynthia Alvarez. Paperback.

ISBN: 978-1-7336038-1-2

60 pages

Chapbook Size: 4.25" x 6.75"

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Publication Date: August 15, 2020

Excerpt: “To All the Apostates in Trump Country: Inauguration Day, 2017,” originally published in Poets Reading the News and reprinted in Cutthroat.

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About the Author

Abigail Carl-Klassen is a poet, writer, educator, translator, and activist. Raised in a small town in the Texas panhandle, she relocated to the U.S.-Mexico border, where she worked for many years in El Paso in community development and public education. Her most recent chapbook, Ain't Country Like You, explores the intersections of race, culture, and class in rural spaces and is available from Digging Press. Her work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Catapult, Willow Springs, Cimarron Review, Guernica, Aster(ix), Kweli, Matter, Huizache, and Post Road, among others. Her work is anthologized in IMANIMAN: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands (Aunt Lute), New Border Voices (Texas A&M University Press), Goodbye Mexico: Poems of Remembrance (Texas Review Press), and Outrage: A Protest  Anthology for Injustice in a 9/11 World(Slough Press) among others. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas El Paso’s Bilingual Creative Writing Program and taught at El Paso Community College and the University of Texas El Paso.