Hundred-Mile Home
A Story Map of Albany, Troy, and the Hudson River
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A creative travelogue of landscape and memory.
Description
We live in a future-facing world, consumed by a sense of urgency. Responsibilities press upon us and, inevitably, the stories of where we live scatter down unnamed streets and recede into the past. Hundred-Mile Home is an intimate portrait—a story map—of Albany, Troy, and the Hudson River that slows time and challenges us to reconsider what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget about the places we call home.
Inspired by the story of New York's capital region, Susan Petrie uses poetry, prose, photos, and drawings to uncover a place of intense natural beauty, legendary people, and remarkable events. She follows the course of its fabled Hudson River from Troy to Olana and back again, turning down dirt roads, wandering into forgotten terrains, and discovering layers of natural and human history that have become invisible.
As a work of art, Hundred-Mile Home moves between past and present. It revives a sense of wonder for what we speed past on our way to somewhere else, and reanimates the forgotten history and often-overlooked natural beauty of the mid-Hudson region. As a work of landscape and memory, it celebrates a place that—despite its instrumental role in the opening of America—has yet to take hold in the national imagination.
Susan Petrie is a writer, editor, and artist with an MFA from Bennington College. She lives in Albany, New York.
Reviews
"A necessary and lyrical invitation to connect, to remember, and to welcome the spirit of home back into view." — from the foreword by Mark Wunderlich, author of God of Nothingness: Poems
"Inspired, inventive, and tender, Hundred-Mile Home is a paean to the enduring, if nearly destroyed enchantments of a place where 'everything's gone invisible,' except the love of home." — Gianna Russo, author of One House Down
"Highly original and compelling, Hundred-Mile Home speaks to the ways in which histories of regions are created, shaped, and remembered." — Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, coeditor of A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley
"Musical and effective." — Lissa Kiernan, founder of The Poetry Barn and author of Two Faint Lines in the Violet