Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods begins with a speaker invoking her dead father, and unfolds as a kind of mystery novel. Spanning decades, and set on a decrepit, inherited farm in
Pennsylvania, the daughter and father navigate the poverty of their environment and their own troubled relationship. Details of the father's murder are gradually uncovered, and we eventually
learn that he was killed by a trusted laborer. The speaker lives with this violence on the farm as an adult, while contending with her own fears, the fallibility of memory, and the voices of
ancestors who once occupied this homestead.
