Bury Me in the Back Forty by Kyler Zeleny

Bury Me in the Back Forty is the highly anticipated successor to the sold-out books “Out West” and “Crown Ditch” by Kyler Zeleny and the final chapter in his prairie trilogy. For a decade now, Kyler Zeleny has been documenting his hometown, a rural community on the Canadian Prairies with deep Ukrainian roots, consisting of 915 people. Based on the idea that the story of any place evolves over time, Zeleny has been using his own photographs, collected objects, community archives, and hidden histories, to revise the community’s history book from the year 1980. The result is a pluralistic history of the community that embraces both official and unofficial accounts of events in the community’s past—a community album that contains not only the roses but also the numerous thorns attached to each stem. It encapsulates the collective virtues and vices found at the heart of any complex place on the verge of disappearing. More importantly, it is simply a story being recorded, recollected, and reconfigured—a layered portrait of small town living that is both unique and universal. The result of which is the stoicism of place, a lived existence, which roars at times and suffers so quietly at others.

Kyler Zeleny (1988) is a Canadian photographer, educator and author of Out West (2014), Found Polaroids (2017), and Crown Ditch & The Prairie Castle (2020). He has a PhD from the joint Communication & Culture program at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University. His work has been exhibited internationally in thirteen countries and has been featured in numerous publications including The Globe & Mail, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Vice, and The Independent.

168 pages, 210 x 267 mm
Hardcover