Amasa Speaker Factory: Poems

Amasa Speaker Factory wanders Michigan's Upper Peninsula with a mining helmet, a pickaxe, and a dizzying soundtrack.

Chad Faries sifts through abandoned mines, family history, and the quiet damage of loving Iron County, Michigan--a place that keeps trying to break him. His poetry mines the U.P.'s economic decline, stubborn resilience, and awkward small-town rituals, balancing bleak humor with bruised affection. Both a personal autopsy and a regional love letter, Faries proves that identity, like iron, is forged under pressure and usually leaves a mess behind.

"Amasa Speaker Factory is a brilliant Book, a literature of roller rinks and huffy bikes and homegrown weed. Chad Faries explores a far-northern Midwest where wilderness has been decades reclaiming mine ruins, radio waves reach through decades as your sweet, tired town 'calls you home with a radio dial, ' through speakers from those same years with voices that will grow with long grass between railroad ties." -- Jonathan Johnson, author of Pine

"Brilliant and beguiling; this book is magnetic as the Yooper iron that binds it. As a U.P. rock opera, Amasa Speaker Factory is a tantalizing mindmeld memory--divine, devilish, hardscrabble, tumultuous reckoned life--pierced with the cold flames of youthful gains shredding loss. The heart skips less beats when we up and lose ourselves." -- Alison Adelle Hdge Coke, author of Look at This Blue

CHAD FARIES is the author of two poetry collections, The Border Will Be Soon and The Book of Knowledge and the memoir Drive Me Out of My Mind. He divides his time between Iron River, Michigan and Thunderbolt, Georgia

Author: Chad Faries
Publisher: Modern History Press
Published: 02/23/2026
Pages: 118
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.37lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.28d
ISBN: 9798896560845

About the Author
Faries, Chad: - Chad Faries is just another Yooper with a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he was managing editorof The Cream City Review. From 2001 to 2003, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Budapest, Hungary. He has published two collections of poetry: The Border Will Be Soon, which won the Emergency Press Open Book Prize, and The Book of Knowledge. His memoir, Drive Me Out of My Mind, chronicles his first ten years in over twenty-four different houses across thecountry and was published in 2011. He is currently working on a followup, Burning Down the Houses.Apart from writing, Faries has also told stories on The Unchained Tour, produced by Moth founder George Dawes Green. He also hosted a theme-based radio program, Dr. Chad's Storytelling Time, for WHCJ 90.3, The Voice of Savannah State. When not telling stories with words, he creates stories with repurposed wood and found objects. His home, Diamond Oaks Treehouse, and vintage camper project, The Glam Camp-with their whimsical carpentry and design-have been featured in This Old House Magazine, Flea Market Décor, South Magazine, and Savannah Magazine. Recently, Faries was the producer and co-subject of an award-winning documentary, Iron Family, a story of community, resilience, and Jazmine, his sister who lives with Down Syndrome. When not teaching at Savannah State University or petting his cats in Thunderbolt, Georgia, Faries is likely lost somewhere in the world on a motorcycle, running up a hill to practice breathing, or practicing yoga handstands with his son, León Karlo del Rocío Faries Leal.