Review: Daniel Lassell
On Daniel Lassell’s Spit
by Tyler Truman Julian
Rural America is a complicated space, and it is further complicated by the changes it is actively undergoing, demographically, socially, economically, and even physically. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people flocked from more densely populated areas to rural ones. This runs in contrast to the well-documented flight of young people, “brain drain,” and scarcity of resources in rural spaces. In this unsettled time, Daniel Lassell’s award-winning collection, Spit, was released by Wheelbarrow Books (2021). Spit is a fascinating look at the rural, its beauties and its challenges. The collection explores the push-pull reality so often experienced by young people growing up in farming and ranching settings. Lassell pushes back against the pastoral, resisting trope and expectation (what are your expectations in a collection ostensibly about llamas?), resisting the outsider’s rose-colored inward view. Lassell pulls the reader into his world and makes them live the heartache of death, the joy of a new birth, the fear and desire of moving away, and the anxiety of selling the family farm. This is reality. This is no privileged pastoral view of some ancient Greek watching another tending his flock. This is a meaningful collection that captures an important American reality.
“When you live on a farm, every animal receives a name,” Lassell writes in the first poem of the collection, “The Llama Named James and John Sons of Thunder.” This poem unravels as tragicomedy, exploring in poetic detail the castration of a male llama. Even with a name, the llama must undergo the everyday husbandry of farm life. These are no pets. From this poem on, Lassell delves into what it means to be an agriculturist with a serious and often questioning eye. Reflecting on the clearing of a field, the displacement of the wild, he asks,
What becomes wind
when the dead
live in it?
What becomes a farm
when by blade,
an emptiness
is called clean,
godly?
(“Laws of Motion”)
Again, this is no pastoral. This is a true-to-life investigation of the rural. Lassell’s poems extend a kindness to animals and labor, a cynicism of humanity, and a well-placed sadness for wild spaces that reinforces the speaker’s mental conflict: here or there, rural or city, mom or dad, family or individual. Early on in the collection, the speaker announces, “There’s a crowd in me that wants out, wants goddamn air” (“Tasting Moonshine”). Still, there’s an intoxication to the rural, it draws people in. In “Spit,” Lassell’s speaker tells us,
Even in this farmland,
the calling of it, farmland
notes an imposed purpose.
My family builds comfort
around loneliness,
says of this farm,
Peaceful is enough.
\\
Christ, some believe,
shared from his lips
a holiness,
that he asked from soil
a muddy lump,
spat, then pressed
that blessing
into another’s eyes.
All the body.
Real life isn’t always beautiful. We are meant to remember the llamas, the castration. The poetic can be brutal. Coyotes prowl the pages of Spit, stirring up the llama herd, threatening Lassell’s speaker’s family, and as the family slowly breaks down, the young moving away, the parents divorcing, the speaker laments,
I’m trying to find grace
in the sternness of a parking meter,
in the crumbling sidewalk squares.
Endings can be
what the lesser gods call good,
but I’m okay if a farm’s ending
waits a little while.
(“Leaving the Farm”)
Post-move, the speaker reels: “Homesickness can howl / a kind of guilt, as I am guilty / to think a place my own. / Every land begets and receives a trauma” (“The Way Home”). Boiled down to red and blue states, a smattering of statistics, and often inaccurate stereotypes, popular depictions of America’s countryside often forget the individual navigating the micro-level familial drama and macro-level societal changes that inform everyday life across the country. Reaching the climax of the collection, Lassell’s speaker slowly comes to terms with his move from the farm and the repercussions of it. In “End of the Llamas,” he announces,
and now I am no longer farmer
unnamed
unnamed
…
maybe my body is now the farm
a housing where now I
carry them
carry them
…
I become at this edge
a pain a healing
Healing marks the end of this collection. Lassell’s speaker looks on as several vultures pick over the remains of his family’s farm and prays, “Let mercy be what guides us” (“Final Visit”). It seems an appropriate prayer in the present moment. Mercy and deep soul searching.
Recently, The Modern West Podcast, a product of Wyoming Public Radio, wrapped up their newest season, which was focused on ghost towns. Quickly, the host, Melodie Edwards, redirected toward “ghostowning,” or the act of becoming a ghost town. She asked what makes small rural towns die, what keeps them alive? In Part 11 of “Ghost Town(ing),” Melodie interviewed, Brian R. Alexander, journalist and author of Glass House, who said, “One thing that upsets me is when I hear or read what I call the smart pants set who want to pigeonhole small towns and rural places as being this monolithic, white throwback retrograde place without having actually spent any time in them.” While it is true that these spaces do boast a surprising diversity, a historical diversity, these spaces are also challenging places to live for marginalized individuals and young people seeking opportunity, whether the community is ghostowning or not. This is why Spit is an important poetry collection. Daniel Lassell pulls back the curtain on the rural to showcase not only the true rural, the lived experience of the rural, but to also share a deeply human story, one that is vulnerable and enjoyable to read regardless of where one calls home.