The Long Grass

The poetry of a feminist woman of faith, The Long Grass counters the losses endemic to our broken lives—beset by climate change, childhood abuse, gender stereotype and inequity, death itself—with the reassuring persistence of the natural world and the enduring promise of human love. The collection reveals an urban landscape by way of its fecund gaps and the corresponding moments of connection between a daughter and her mother. “The long grass is mown but not yet raked,” the title poem says, invoking Whitman’s graves of cut grass, but highlighting not just the scythe to come but the chastisement we experience throughout life. Rhoades is equally adept at ecstatic odes, full of word play and joy, that deepen these complicated looks at our crowded existences. “In the bright world” of the twenty-first century, the goddess, Demeter, commutes on the Staten Island Ferry in a sequence plaited through the collection reminding us of the lively gods we are and all that we cannot be. In a voice at once calm and urgent, The Long Grass sings in the haunting psalms of our difficult days.