Kill All the Chickens

Grief and Memory on an Ozark Farm

Amy Olberding

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781509575442
• eBook ISBN:
  9781509575459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

As a philosopher, Amy Olberding is trained to wrestle with abstraction. But when she takes over her ancestral family farm in the Ozarks, her experience turns far more earthy. Her double life in philosophy and farming worked well enough, for a time. But then she tried to write a philosophy book about grief.

Olberding's profession prepared her to write a scholarly book, but left her ill-equipped to do so among the haunting traces of her ancestors: the grandfather who could fix anything, the uncle who cautioned against letting your brains show, and the grandmother who once had all her chickens killed to conceal her hillbilly origins. Like her grandmother, Olberding was adept at killing chickens, at least metaphorically, taking on the marks of class and education expected of professors. But her efforts to write dispassionately about grief from a farm populated with family ghosts quickly foundered. Instead, Olberding presents a lyrical mosaic that refuses to shy away from the acute confusions that come with loss. Insistently joining farm life to learning and Ozark ancestors to philosophers, Olberding offers evocative meditations on community and tradition, the contradictions of mental and manual labor, the worlds of urbane airs and country speech, and describes a life of the mind slowly giving way to raw experience.

Kill All the Chickens is the book you get when loss is less a problem to solve than a place where you live. Most of all, it is an effort to revive some chickens, to let the earthy stuff of sorrow sometimes mess up the cleaner wisdoms philosophy might offer.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• 1 What I’m Really Saying
• 2 What a Fellowship
• 3 Heat-Strengthened
• 4 Some Glad Morning
• 5 I Think, Maybe, It Isn’t
• 6 Circle Be Unbroken
• 7 The Invention of Death
• 8 Fine for Caius
• 9 At the Orthocenter
• 10 Ary a Word
• 11 Kill All the Chickens
• 12 Independence Day
• 13 Wasting my Fiftieth Year
• 14 I Hope to Meet You There
• 15 Slipping the Net
• 16 The Armor of God
• 17 Ways to Kill a Groundhog
• 18 Lay By and Store
• 19 Come Home
• 20 The Supply Closet of Glory
• 21 Nod Line
• 22 Some Sort of Deal
• 23 Best Keep It
• 24 Comrades That So Long Have Gone
• 25 The Last Start
• 26 Once the Roof Goes
• 27 Cain’t Cry
• 28 Signs and Portents
• 29 Death Just Got Out of This Truck
• 30 Decoration Day 2025
• 31 Anything at All
• 32 The Chance of It
• Acknowledgments
• End User License Agreement