Daybook from Sheep Meadow

Daybook from Sheep Meadow finds Peter Dimock returning to the breakdown of Americas imperialist history that he started exploring in his groundbreaking previous novel, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time. In Daybook, Dimock expands on what it means to refute the narrative of American greatness and what happens once one starts on that path. Historian Tallis Martinson has grappled for years with the atrocities of the American condition through meditative notebook entries, wherein he has attempted to create a historical method that guides an individual s personal thought outside the language of empire. However, when words fail him completely, he commits himself to a psychiatric facility, mute and unable to write. Daybook presents Tallis notebook entries, annotated by his brother and editor Christopher Rentho Martinson. Christopher initially follows the entries complex guided meditations in hopes of being able to reach Tallis during his visits to the psychiatric facility. Instead, he finds himself immersed in his own familys implication in the normalized atrocities of his countrys past and present. An experiment in the capacity of literature to re-lay the trajectory of Americas future, Daybook stages a space wherein the reader can register and, potentially, remedy the criminal catastrophe of the American political arena.