Coop: A Year of Raising Poultry, Pigs & Parenting - A Guide to Homesteading & Sustainable Farming for Beginners" (Note: This optimized title: 1. Uses SEO-friendly keywords like "raising poultry," "sustainable farming," and "homesteading" 2. Clarifies the book's purpose as a "guide" 3. Specifies the target audience ("beginners") 4. Adds implied usage context about learning homesteading skills)

Michael Perry has distilled a great deal of living into a few short books. His "Population 485" grabbed me; he tells the day-to-day life stories of volunteer firefighters and Emergency Medical Technicians who serve rural America, and who often make the few minutes' difference between life and death. Men and women who go about their daily business wearing a pager, which at a moment's notice may call them from being a barber or butcher to being a lifesaving rescuer or to humping a rough heavy hose into a building to save someone's home.This book, "Coop", takes you headlong into rural America. Seamlessly, he weaves the story of his present -- returning to farm life and raising his little family -- with stories of his past, growing up on his parents' farm. For good measure, he throws in an endearing account of his own parents' courtship and their selfless role as foster parents.He tells about of his foster sister Rya, who had Down's syndrome and a cardiac defect that was to prove fatal. His account of the last evening of her short life would bring tears to the eyes of a ceramic frog. It is the most powerful and evocative few pages of writing I've read.I am an adopted son of the same part of the country he writes about, and our shared experiences -- raking, baling and putting up hay, for instance -- make reading his book feel the same as sitting around with an old friend having a beer and talking about days on the farm. But he infuses poetry into his descriptions: "Sisal [twine] that smelled of oil and Brazilian sun...". What a visceral image that brings! That scene, a simple description of putting up a field of hay into bales for winter -- took me back over the decades in a rush of memory.Even if you're a lifelong "city slicker", you must have this book. Not from the library, no, it must be on your shelf. Breeze through it once, stopping only to catch your breath as you find you've read something profound in its simplicity. Dog-ear your favorite passages and go read them again. Slowly. See if you can figure out how he does it.Michael Perry is certainly a reader's writer, but he is a writer's writer.He's one of the best we have, and this in my opinion is his finest work to date.