by Ali Nuri

In Cara Dees’ Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland, language and memory hover unflinchingly above the margins between the knowable and unknowable. Set amidst a backdrop of Midwestern farmlands, Dees parses the visceral details surrounding the loss of both parents, recollections and dreamscapes achingly entwining on the page. Here, the body is an unfathomable landscape—a pasture spreading infinitely—with paths and roads winding and disappearing in the horizon. Time and aging are measured as seasons working the fields of the body, and toothed creatures—stallions, ponies, and calves—disclose a primal wildness and a feral vulnerability contained within:

Even the brace of ponies

devouring the field mouths
the armor from your heart.

In its silence their words blow open,
Here us. For you – we.

Their tails shake like the sky.
It is too much

and it is not enough,
the wealth of you

stretching endlessly, far wheat to far
wheat.

In the heart of the field lies the near-impenetrable house of the soul, with its entrances shifting and warping as it starts to give way to the dark. Throughout, blue is symbolic of not only the cold and lifelessness, but also the uncharted and mysterious as the speaker attempts to reach—and speak for—the dead, whose silence deafens the grieving. In the end, the door of her mother’s soul is reduced to a blue ash and her windows are impassable for the world of the living:

Still,
too much blue spills into her eyes,
as though an unlived land scraped

its hills against them, her spine left
piecemeal to the steady dark.

No knowing now, how her entrances
will take shape, what becomes

of her side-roads, her private paths. The soul
unravels, re-spins as it will: a native

hazard, a windfall.

The collection weaves together the faint aftershocks of death with the nameless pain felt by sexual assault survivors for whom the body no longer feels like their own. The memory of such colossal events, or lack of it, confers a similar dissociative experience through the realization that we are all relatively defenseless—a mere instance removed from emotional annihilation. Probing the razor-sharp vertices of loss from every angle, this sweeping observation of grief reveals death to be a “emptying” violation of sorts, where the “remembering” and “not remembering” equally gut the griever and confiscate any sense of free agency within the body:

My mother responds         by not responding.
            Gnats empty the field and settle our arms.

There are kinds of emptiness I’m only now learning
            to recognize, coda         with no closing inside them.

A poet once told me          to speak explicitly
            about the night I was        rummaged through, that

without details a poem is incomplete,
            but most of what I remember          is not remembering.

Cara Dees’ Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland is a must-read that steadily holds a mirror to the unspoken wounds of grief left festering long after our dead are laid to rest. By weaving and unraveling imagery both tender and stark, Dees slowly unveils the poignant remoteness of another’s soul, where we all, at one point or another, will cling to the borders of that wilderness waiting for their mouths to “burst into whole languages” we can decipher.