{"id":15691,"date":"2019-12-01T01:00:18","date_gmt":"2019-12-01T07:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/?p=15691"},"modified":"2019-12-01T17:11:24","modified_gmt":"2019-12-01T23:11:24","slug":"exorcism-lessons-in-the-heartland-poems-by-cara-dees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/15691","title":{"rendered":"Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland: Poems by Cara Dees"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Barrow Street Press, October 2019)
\n<\/span>Reviewed by Chris Ketchum\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To use one of the poet\u2019s own words, Cara Dees\u2019 debut collection, <\/span>Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland,<\/span><\/i> is a vigil:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. A devotional watching, esp. the watch kept on the eve of a festival or holy day.<\/span><\/i><\/li>\n
  2. Prayers said or sung at a nocturnal service, spec. for the dead.<\/span><\/i><\/li>\n
  3. An occasion or period of keeping awake for some special reason or purpose; a watch kept during the natural time for sleep.<\/span><\/i><\/li>\n
  4. A wakefulness, or period of this, due to inability to sleep.<\/span><\/i><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Dees\u2019 speaker reflects on the periods before, during and after her mother\u2019s death, from pre-diagnosis to aftermath. Every poem, even those dealing with eros, women\u2019s reproductive rights, and other issues, is imbued with an awareness of the mother: at times, through direct expression, or as a voice ghosted in white space and subtext. Dees\u2019 poems are awake to the suffering one feels after losing a loved one\u2014elegies conscious and alive to grief, long after others would have submitted to sleep.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \u201cVigil,\u201d the first section of <\/span>Exorcism Lessons<\/span><\/i>, introduces us to the book\u2019s prevailing conflict, as well as the forms, styles, and techniques Dees develops throughout the collection. \u201cVigil for Another Onset\u201d serves as a linguistic and thematic roadmap for the poems that follow, exemplifying the poet\u2019s emotional concerns and the exquisite language she uses to render them:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Preferred words canceled
    \n<\/span><\/i><\/i><\/p>\n

    their footprints. No <\/span><\/i>persimmon
    \n<\/span>could survive within that sirenpeal, no<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

    strike aflame. <\/span>Wrong to write, perhaps,<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

    but true: in that place, your cancer
    \n<\/span><\/i>was the steadiest presence.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

    Bluing, mute, we toured the storm,\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

    heaved steaming water to the mares,
    \n<\/span><\/i>disquieted the stunned apple branches.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

    In this passage, Dees displays some of the book\u2019s most remarkable gifts, in addition to offering context for the poems that follow. Her speaker is one who reaches, always, for the right word\u2014using a lexicon that draws from classical mythology, agriculture, and the landscape of Wisconsin\u2014all while acknowledging the ultimate failure of language to \u201csurvive within that sirenpeal\u201d of her mother\u2019s prognosis. Where existing language falters, Dees invents her own dictionary of portmanteaux and compound words to narrow the gap between signifier and signified. Words like \u201csirenpeal,\u201d \u201cheartplace,\u201d and \u201canti-ink,\u201d \u201cpleadpiece,\u201d \u201cafterday,\u201d and \u201cwildwanderer\u201d purl the collection with a personal language reminiscent of Brenda Shaughnessy\u2019s <\/span>Interior with Sudden Joy<\/span><\/i>\u2014both works construct new terms that actively subvert phallogocentrism, locating women as the dominant voices in each poem on the word-level.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Dees\u2019 particular <\/span>\u00e9criture f\u00e9minine<\/span><\/i> enacts the anti-hierarchical, anti-binary style of writing imagined by H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous in \u201cThe Laugh of the Medusa\u201d and <\/span>The Newly Born Woman<\/span><\/i>. Dees resists a lyric form that reproduces binary couplings, such as active\/passive, which make meaning through hierarchy\u2014in hierarchy, Cixous would say, \u201cDeath is always at work.\u201d Instead, these poems offer us compound words, terms conjoined with forward slashes and\/or hyphens, and words recast as different parts of speech that signify through multiplicity rather than erasure. This is especially evident in the book\u2019s third section, \u201cAfter Tremor,\u201d which contains the most direct examinations of female sexuality, patriarchy, sexual assault, and reproductive rights. The poem \u201cNow I\u2019m a foregone conclusion, the voices in my head talk and talk\u2026\u201d explores this multiplicity, demonstrating how a single word fails to convey the complexity of sexual assault or the circumstances under which it may occur:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \u2026<\/span> I was burgundied\/
    \n<\/span><\/i>whipped with drink\/shoeless\/far from
    \n<\/span><\/i>myself, when his hands turned disciplined
    \n<\/span><\/i>over me. His body dug along\/into\/through\/
    \n<\/span><\/i>beyond mine. I lost the residue of an inner summer.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

    Here, Dees gives us a choice: we may read each individual phrase as one retelling of the event, or we may consider each possible phrase simultaneously, as an accretion of truths. Dees\u2019 language constructs a female identity that rejects singularity and centers women\u2019s concerns in sex and grief and memory. Her unique lexicon enacts the<\/span> jouissance <\/span><\/i>depicted in the section\u2019s titular poem, \u201cAfter Tremor\u201d: \u201ctwo fingers … slightbent,\u201d the speaker\u2019s \u201cmulti-valenced sleep,\u201d her nerves as they \u201cre-soften.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    The possibilities of a non-phallocentric writing pervade nearly every concern explored in <\/span>Exorcism Lessons.<\/span><\/i> Dees challenges the Supreme Court\u2019s authority over reproductive rights in the <\/span>Burwell v. Hobby Lobby <\/span><\/i>decision <\/span>in the poem \u201cJohn Roberts,\u201d (a poem which includes what might be the book\u2019s funniest line: \u201cYou will like it, John\u201d). She imagines the mother after death in \u201cResurrected, a version of my mother dwells in silence,\u201d with the power to wonder \u201cwhy I did not tell her<\/span> what I did not tell her.\u201d Her language prods her parents\u2019 heteronormative expression of gender roles in \u201cComplicated Grief\u201d as the speaker\u2019s father \u201clearn[s] to keep \/ the windthrown house she had kept \/ for him.\u201d But even these critical examinations of loved ones do not appear without tenderness. In \u201cWindfall,\u201d a poem with an epigraph explaining that the speaker\u2019s father \u201cresuscitates a paralyzed woman,\u201d Dees perceives loss as the father experiences it: \u201c… The ambulance gone, \/ you stand alone again in the hay. \/ Your doctor\u2019s hands, pickpockets \/ of those unlit lands, again alone.\u201d Wherever Dees turns the eye, she turns it with emotional vigilance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    What, then, in a book of such promising spirit, is there to exorcise? Perhaps it\u2019s the very forces of oppression which this book scrutinizes\u2014the patriarchal systems that frame the sun as \u201ca good \/ and strange hymn, a huge oneness \/\/ feasting on itself, a proud husband \/ to itself,\u201d that give preachers the sole power to perform an exorcism, and Justices legal jurisdiction over women\u2019s bodies. Or maybe exorcism, here, is a disinterring of the spirit: how an author\/speaker gives her mother new life in language. It\u2019s a language tailormade for women\u2014their bodies\/hearts\/actions\/passions\/logos\/pathos\/minds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    ***<\/p>\n

    Chris Ketchum is a poet from northern Idaho. He is an MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University, where he serves as a poetry editor for <\/span>Nashville Review<\/span>. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in <\/span>D<\/span>unes Review<\/span>, <\/span>Five Points<\/span>, <\/span>Tar River Poetry<\/span><\/em>, and elsewhere. He was runner-up for the 2019 <\/span>Pinch <\/span>Literary Award in poetry.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland\u00a0 (Barrow Street Press, October 2019) Reviewed by Chris Ketchum\u00a0 To use one of the poet\u2019s own words, Cara Dees\u2019 debut collection, Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland, is a vigil:\u00a0 A devotional watching, esp. the watch kept on the eve of a festival or holy day. Prayers said or sung at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2041,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[61],"tags":[55],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-455","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15691"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2041"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15691"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15930,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15691\/revisions\/15930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}