Praise for Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland

Winner of the 2018 Barrow Street Book Prize

“Navigating a landscape of loss with language that is both lyrically charged and freshly brutal, Cara Dees has given us a first book that is unexpected and burning with life. The weight of absence fills the pages, but the world is not without light and resurrection. Both suffused with feeling and fueled by a restless search for a way of being in the world, this is a beautiful book alive with humanity.”

—Ada Limón, author of The Carrying

“Cara Dees’s Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland is a beautiful, heartbreaking, and sometimes feisty poetic exploration of the vast linguistic gap between things as they are, and how we would have them be. At the center of that abstraction, waiting to be unpacked, resides the concrete, inescapable experience of suffering: the illness-ravaged bodies of our loved ones, dying; the mute victims of animal cruelty; the silenced survivors of eons of sexual violence. This is poetry for grownups. Grounded in a gasp-inducing, massive lexicon, Dees’s complicated, tragic vision ultimately transcends itself. “For this moment, too, the rarest/words,” she writes in the last lines of the last poem. “Even in this world/an arc must still be possible.”

—Kate Daniels, author of In the Months of My Son’s Recovery

“In Cara Dees’s elegiac book, loss imbues experience with its contours, textures, its sensual being and presence. The poems, complex and brooding, repay close attention and their gift is deep intellectual and emotional understanding, an erotics of grief. The effect is strange and compelling and unlike anything I have read in contemporary poetry. And one more thing, the series of poems that address the Supreme Court of John Roberts, regarding its rulings about a woman’s body, already read like classics.”

—Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry

“Time, space, and even the writing process are reconfigured by the mother’s death; throughout the collection, Dees explores the urgency of this changed landscape.… Addressees of these poems, as well as readers, find a speaker whose powers of writing and of the mind challenge the status quo of male control over—and violence against—women.… In Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland, Dees presents both silence and language—and the intersection of the two—as powerful, necessary expressions of loss.

—Lisa Low, The Adroit Journal

“Dees’ poems are awake to the suffering one feels after losing a loved one… Her speaker is one who reaches, always, for the right word—using a lexicon that draws from classical mythology, agriculture, and the landscape of Wisconsin—all while acknowledging the ultimate failure of language to “survive within that sirenpeal” of her mother’s prognosis.”

— Chris Ketchum, Nashville Review

“Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland is not for the faint of heart.…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.”

— Emma Faesi Hudelson, The Rupture