Reviewed by Emma Faesi Hudelson

Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland is not for the faint of heart. The winner of the 2018 Barrow Street Book Prize, judged by Ada Limón, Cara Dees's debut collection deals unflinchingly with the complexities of death and trauma. Set in the relentless farmland of rural Wisconsin, Exorcism Lessons is divided into three sections—"Vigil," "Fragments of the Afteryears," and "After Tremor"—and is filled with horses, timothy fields, and foxes. The death of the speaker's mother is this book's gravitational center, the separator between before and after. Her illness and dying process occupies most of the first section. The second deals with grief, with the speaker's post-mother life: "So this is the sunset with you removed—." The final section still echoes with grief, but shifts to activism, to a call for protection against sexual violence and lawmakers who seek to repress reproductive rights. Again and again, female bodies become the subjects of these poems, whether it is the dying body of a mother, a mare's body who "flayed her hoof like a shucked oyster," or a body trying to learn how to have sex after surviving assault. Dees is not afraid to uncover the parts, like tumors and wounds, that are usually kept covered. 

Both caring for the dying and grieving for the dead have always been women's work, especially in the midwestern farm setting Dees paints so beautifully. The natural world and the female world come together in hyacinths, horses, death, and the women who watch over them. Dees's speaker holds vigil at her mother's bedside and deals with such important but unlovely tasks as "press[ing] the carnation-pink / Toothette over the thrush stretching / toward your tonsils." The invisible labor of caregiving is spotlighted in poems like "Weight" and "The Mound," and the result is tragic and illuminating. There is beauty in changing sheets, in helping one's mother breathe, but it is also hard work, both physically and emotionally. Too often, this work goes ignored.

Dees creates an elegy for the mother, but also an elegy to death itself, to the space that remains after the person who occupied it is gone. In "Resurrected, a version of my mother dwells in silence," the speaker's mother appears in dreams, "counting money, which she understood to be a transaction / between beautiful and necessary things." Dreams and memories become powerful representations of the relationship that existed before death, but also prove that death doesn't really end a relationship. Dees also works with—and through—the power of words themselves: "Each poem chose / one headstrong color and became it utterly, / not like this blownback space, this all- / over sound, where petal can mean mare pressed / to ground, / can mean little girl lost, little woman / stormbound . . ." She is a poet who is well-aware of the work she's doing, of the different vectors she makes when she drops a word like "caesura" in a poem full of caesuras. She manages to make these moves without seeming obsessed with technique. Her poems are not inside conversations with other poets, but they never dumb themselves down, either.

Dees's voice is haunting and ethereal but can be cutting and dry, as it is in the biting trio of poems addressed to Supreme Court Justices. Each addresses women's reproductive rights, and in each, the speaker is marvelously, poetically, furious. After an epigraph mentioning "abortion through bleaching one's uterus," we get these lines: "Madam or most likelier   Sir, surely by now / you have noticed    the smell of women." In these poems, Dees holds the arbiters of women's rights accountable to the damage they can do, and she pulls no punches. Good for her. The final poem of the book, "After Tremor," deals gorgeously with another topic that isn't discussed enough: sexual dysfunction post-trauma. It ends with "Good thirst. Even in this world / an arc must still be possible," a note of hope leading out of darkness.

Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland is a study of grief, womanhood, and trauma. It is about being a survivor—both a person listed in the "survived by" portion of obituaries and a sexual assault survivor. By lending poetics to topics normally only whispered about, Dees is doing some serious unsilencing. From the beginning of the book to the end, her poems celebrate, elegize, and fight for female bodies: for mothers, for the land, and for all womankind.