Thrust by Heather Derr-Smith
Persea Books, 2017
Heather Derr-Smith considers girlhood and sexual violence at the bloody intersection of place, religion, and patriarchy in her award-winning collection, Thrust. In this era of #Me Too, Thrust is not only timely, but important as Derr-Smith takes the reader from childhood trauma into adulthood, showing how violence is handed down, simmering under the surface. In “One Last Thing,” she weaves the metaphor of the boxer: “like words I took right out of your mouth, / how love can get up on the count of nine.” Despite the sexual violence at the core this book, Thrust is ultimately a book of triumph, how love indeed gets up before the last count.
Thrust opens in Virginia, and Derr-Smith’s attention to cadence and detail brings a specific Southern Gothic esthetic to these poems. In “K.O.,” she writes,
The fog fingered along the cemetery was
where the Confederate dead lay buriedand where we used to walk, my mother
and me, her stories of ghosts, stories of loss.She pushed me against the ground, knees in the grass,
kicked me, screaming, when I told hermy secret, that I’d had sex with a boy,
and she wailed, But he’s ugly! He’s ugly!
as I knelt beneath the statue of the unknown soldier.
The war dead are never far, the past palatably close: “The past is connected to the present like a man’s arm to his shoulder, / the punch that breaks the jaw in pieces, the hit that leaves you speechless,” she says in “Glass Jaw,” and in “Hazel Run,” “Before the violence of adulthood was the violence of childhood / and before that a whole history of bloodshed as inheritance.”
Derr-Smith indicts the patriarchy in noting the cool assumption of power: “I just entered you, he said. Like name it and claim it. / The preacher on the radio winds his black store / around your eyes. Small red clots of / language between my legs. This is where the girl was found. Hot Tramp.” In “The Quarry” she watches boys cliff dive, noting how they could hurl their bodies into sky, so certain the world would catch them, and how different from her experience as a girl. Later in the book, she recounts her recent rape with a clear-eyed, matter-of-fact directness:
Mercy Seat
River at night, carbon black, half-open door, a valve.
The fountains of the great deep burst apart.When the rib was cut from Adam he was
Separated from himself and hardly knew the lossUntil he met it face to face.
I hope our correspondence give you some relief.I was raped, just a few years ago. He entered through the doorway,
pushed me into the room. I comforted him, spoketo him like a mother to her son.
And that’s the crux. Sometimes a stranger rips you apart
calls you a bitch and cunt and you say to him—Do you know what you say? You say: It’s going to be OK.
Everything is going to be all right.Other times you want to put your hand in a stranger’s torn side
and follow him across the threshold, through the opened door.I’ve got a mandible, I’ve got a fibula with a greenstick fracture.
It hurts like lightning when it happens, your first touch.
It hurts with cold precision like a key slipping into its lock when you look at
me like that.The Psalmist says, All my bones should say who is like you.
Survivors will recognize the strategy to withstand in this poem. Derr-Smith returns to Judeo-Christian images in this poem, but empowered, a sharp departure from the use of religion in the Gothic South of her childhood. Reclamation continues in this book of reckoning, this book of the triumphant fighter who ends by saying, “I’m just telling you / things I want to remember forever about being alive.” This book leaves us very much alive, still standing, victorious.
–
Michele Bombardier’s collection What We Do is a current finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her poetry and reviews have been published in dozens of journals, such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and others. She earned her M.F.A. in poetry at Pacific University and is the founder of Fishplate Poetry.