“I’ll be surprised if it sells six copies,” I said, and I meant it. When you test the patience of readers with a poem about moving from the city to the woods, published online over the course of a year in thirteen monthly installments, it’s foolish to expect even a trickle of demand for a paperback version. A print book of formal poetry about life in the Maryland woods, inspired by Old English alliterative verse and ancient and medieval calendar poems! Almost nothing is less marketable.

Yet to my amazement, all copies in the first batch are spoken for, and I’m planning to print up a second batch.

If you’d like a copy from the next batch, please let me know! Use my email address, jeffsypeck -at – gmail – dot- com, either to send me $15 via Paypal ($20 if you’re outside the U.S.) or to tell me you’d like to pay in some other way. The price includes shipping. (To browse the first drafts of each monthly installment, click here.)

I’m grateful to everyone who took an interest in this poem when I posted it in 2015 and 2016. It was one of those projects that takes on a life of its own, consuming your creative hours even though you no longer remember deciding to start it. I rarely write about myself, and I doubt I will again—but I like to think this poem is about something quite beyond myself anyway.

Thank you to everyone who’s giving The Beallsville Calendar an unlikely second life in paperback. Like the move to the country it dramatizes, it’s turning out so much better than I imagined.