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Spit
The first-ever poetry book set on a llama farm, Daniel Lassell's debut collection, Spit, examines the roles we play in the act of belonging. It is a portrait of a boy living on a farm populated with chickens sung to sleep by lullaby, captive wolves next door that attack a child, and a herd of llamas learning to survive despite coyotes and a chaotic family. The collection in part explores the role of the body in health and illness and one's treatment of the earth and others. A theme of spirituality also weaves throughout the collection as the speaker treks into adulthood, yearning for peace amid the decline of his parents' marriage. Driven by a "wish to visit / some landless landscape," the speaker eventually leaves his family's farm, only to find that return is impossible. After losing the farm and the llama herd to his parents' divorce, the speaker wrestles with the role of presence as it relates to healing, remarking, "I wish enough, / to have only // these memories I have." Unflinching at every turn, the collection pushes the boundaries of "home" to arrive upon new meaning, definition, and purpose.
Book Details
- Publisher: Wheelbarrow Books
- Publish Date: Jul 1st, 2021
- Pages: 102
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.80in - 5.90in - 0.30in - 0.25lb
- EAN: 9781611863963
- Categories: • American - General
About the Author
Lassell, Daniel: - DANIEL LASSELL is the author of the forthcoming Ad Spot, a limited edition chapbook. His poems have been published in the Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Puerto del Sol, Birmingham Poetry Review, and
Prairie Schooner. He grew up in Kentucky, where he raised llamas and alpacas. He now lives in Colorado with his wife and children.
Prairie Schooner. He grew up in Kentucky, where he raised llamas and alpacas. He now lives in Colorado with his wife and children.
Praise for this book
In Daniel Lassell's Spit, we see the leaning faces of barns disappear. There is a relationship between what is sacred and what is empty, between homesickness and the guilt of thinking of any place as one's own. What I love about this collection is its ability to convey both an adoration of landscape and the violence inherent to the pastoral: "beads of yolk dapple the soil."--Taneum Bambrick, author of Vantage
Rife with biblical references, Daniel Lassell's poems suggest that the animal kingdom is distinct, regardless of our claims of preservation, and cannot be governed by humans who lack the capacity to first understand ourselves. The devastation of this collection is in being deftly led through the experiences within its microcosm, only to question the whole of existence. In image after taut image, the terror and magic of life are all.--Chelsea Dingman, author of Through a Small Ghost and Thaw
In this captivating and inventive debut, there's good humor and plenty of sorrow, a story of recovery and growth, of finding community and healing in a place far away. Daniel Lassell writes beautiful poems with tenderness and care, even when he tells hard truths.--Todd Davis, author of Native Species and Winterkill
These poems teach me again that our membership in the practiced knowledge of life and death is equal to its burden of daily chores, the specific transactions of love we choose or don't, the countless ways we can still return to our places and ourselves. Spit is at once a coming-of-age story and an elegy for that so-called coming-of-age, a necessary guidebook for anyone hoping to go home again.--Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory and Render / An Apocalypse
Daniel Lassell's arresting and visceral debut smolders with heartache, gritty natural landscapes, and an insistent lyrical beauty that both celebrates and haunts the edges of our familiar world. It is the story of a boy and young man who grows up amid vast yet confining farmlands, llamas, power plants, sunset-blazed wheat, and a family he both cherishes and knows he must flee. And the lessons are hard-learned, whittled into bark like initials separated by a heart. These poems illuminate the complexity, curiosity, and rawness of life in an often-neglected part of America. Spit is a starkly rendered cultural exploration, personal journey, and love letter to the familiarity and the strangeness that compose a "home."―John Sibley Williams, author of Skin Memory and As One Fire Consumes Another