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Thrust: Poems
In the tradition of Dorothy Allison, these poems find power in their renderings of an abused Southern girlhood. Winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, this potent collection revisits a backwoods Virginia marred by sexual violence. In explosive poems, which explore the confluence of trauma and desire, Heather Derr-Smith reclaims a troubled past, empowering the present through an unlikely chorus of grace and fury.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
Published October 10, 2017
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39 people want to read
About the author
Heather Derr-Smith
4 books24 followersHeather Derr-Smith was born in Dallas, Texas in 1971. She spent most of her childhood in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She earned her BA in Art History from the University of Virginia where she also took poetry workshops with Rita Dove, Charles Wright, and Greg Orr. She went on to earn her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has three books of poetry, "Each End of the World" (Main Street Rag Press, 2005, Editor's Choice Award), "The Bride Minaret" (University of Akron Press, 2008, Editor's Choice Award) and Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016) Her fourth collection, Thrust, won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize from Persea Books and will be published in 2017.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 10, 2018
"... We're not naked,
but there's a nakedness between us.
Listen, you can hear
the sound of my breath caught like wing beats against your neck
and the hawkmoths and the hummingbird moths in the dark,
tonguing the corolla."
These are poems of the body, poems of sex and sensuality, of rawness and energy and power and trauma and intimacy and strength and taboo and danger and and the violence we do to each other whether we mean to or not.
"I'll write you back. I'll write you down."
but there's a nakedness between us.
Listen, you can hear
the sound of my breath caught like wing beats against your neck
and the hawkmoths and the hummingbird moths in the dark,
tonguing the corolla."
These are poems of the body, poems of sex and sensuality, of rawness and energy and power and trauma and intimacy and strength and taboo and danger and and the violence we do to each other whether we mean to or not.
"I'll write you back. I'll write you down."
February 7, 2018
Thrust
verb
1. to push forcibly; shove; put or drive with force...
Heather Derr-Smith's latest collection of poetry is aptly titled. There is considerable force behind every poem in this collection. These are not docile poems about a girl and her pet chicken. These are poems that contain throbbing, shivering, cutting, ripping, crushing, knocking, tasting, bleeding, sparring, breaking, sucking, and, most notably, thrusting. The result is a collection of poems that are very visceral, but which quickly lose their shock.
I'm not a big fan of the meandering style or the crass depictions displayed in Thrust, but its the repetitiveness of it that really distanced me. They lost their punch. Readers of poetry who appreciate an author that doesn't ever let up, however, will likely love the weight of this collection.
verb
1. to push forcibly; shove; put or drive with force...
Heather Derr-Smith's latest collection of poetry is aptly titled. There is considerable force behind every poem in this collection. These are not docile poems about a girl and her pet chicken. These are poems that contain throbbing, shivering, cutting, ripping, crushing, knocking, tasting, bleeding, sparring, breaking, sucking, and, most notably, thrusting. The result is a collection of poems that are very visceral, but which quickly lose their shock.
I'm not a big fan of the meandering style or the crass depictions displayed in Thrust, but its the repetitiveness of it that really distanced me. They lost their punch. Readers of poetry who appreciate an author that doesn't ever let up, however, will likely love the weight of this collection.
November 12, 2020
Oh. Wow.
These are dark, sensual poems. They are occasionally violent, occasionally bleak poems. But there is something that rises above that darkness, conquers it.
I highlighted so many lines, folded over so many pages...
Read this one. Trust me.
These are dark, sensual poems. They are occasionally violent, occasionally bleak poems. But there is something that rises above that darkness, conquers it.
I highlighted so many lines, folded over so many pages...
Read this one. Trust me.
December 29, 2019
I'm looking at the title of this book, probably with a mind affected by too many word puzzles, and seeing the different words you can make out of that one word: THRUST -
>trust
>rust
>ruts
>hurt
>hurts
>shut
>us
These images, and many more of the pain, complexity, longings, suffering, even to the point of violence, which can be a part of the forging and the shaping human relationships and interactions are the glue that holds the center together in this collection. The poems are like a spackled wall of images pulled from every emotion, remembrance, flowers from nature, etc., and all mish-mashed together into a barely coherent narrative, but with an overall impression of living one's life in a barely survivable way in opposition to what would be judged by most as normal rhythms and cadences for life. And, by my judgement, a life lived through so much fracture and violence must be done more like a sheer force of nature to be able to endure, much less carry on from day to day.
The opening poem Hide Out depicts two children in an apparently abusive home described as a "battlefield" where the brother protects his sister from their father in a house where
". . . the walls ache. The doors of the rooms
barred shut. Their father's footsteps rattle the threshold, shotguns
leaning against the bedframe, loaded and cocked." (p. 3)
It appears that the images of domestic violence, physical and sexual abuse are only further magnified thematically in the poems that follow. Some seem to be remembrances of violence and abuse suffered by the narrator in the poems, the sister in the first poem. Other poems seem to be later snapshots from a person who lives in the wake of untreated PTSD resulting from having grown up in a violent, abusive home as a child. Some of the powerfully raw images include:
>split lips after the fight (p. 4)
>the punch that breaks the jaw in pieces (p. 4)
>Your body just obeyed, crouch and clinch, the reflex against another body in its strike (p. 5)
>Before the violence of adulthood was the violence of childhood and before that a whole history of bloodshed as inheritance. (p. 5)
>My mother's Jesus and Reagan, my stepfather's beer and secretaries, their joint quest of catharsis in lusts and fistfights, headbutt and pulled hair (p. 6)
>Make love out of the kick and the punch (p. 7)
>every time I was hit or kicked (p. 9)
>In the end, they had all been frightened of her, how she rose from the blows, like the ring of a bell, unbreakable. (p. 10)
>So she's hit again. Hit once. Hit again when she ducks.
So her dad kicks her down the hall. (p. 10)
There are many more powerful scenes, although not wholly coherent, which may be an intentional approach to evoke the scattered thought patterns of a human mind living out of a cycle of trauma and violence. There are multiple mentions of rape and physical abuse (several poems mention being pulled by the hair). Interestingly, these images are often juxtaposed against pastoral images of countryside, wildflowers, creeks, Mennonites persons, and insects.
>trust
>rust
>ruts
>hurt
>hurts
>shut
>us
These images, and many more of the pain, complexity, longings, suffering, even to the point of violence, which can be a part of the forging and the shaping human relationships and interactions are the glue that holds the center together in this collection. The poems are like a spackled wall of images pulled from every emotion, remembrance, flowers from nature, etc., and all mish-mashed together into a barely coherent narrative, but with an overall impression of living one's life in a barely survivable way in opposition to what would be judged by most as normal rhythms and cadences for life. And, by my judgement, a life lived through so much fracture and violence must be done more like a sheer force of nature to be able to endure, much less carry on from day to day.
The opening poem Hide Out depicts two children in an apparently abusive home described as a "battlefield" where the brother protects his sister from their father in a house where
". . . the walls ache. The doors of the rooms
barred shut. Their father's footsteps rattle the threshold, shotguns
leaning against the bedframe, loaded and cocked." (p. 3)
It appears that the images of domestic violence, physical and sexual abuse are only further magnified thematically in the poems that follow. Some seem to be remembrances of violence and abuse suffered by the narrator in the poems, the sister in the first poem. Other poems seem to be later snapshots from a person who lives in the wake of untreated PTSD resulting from having grown up in a violent, abusive home as a child. Some of the powerfully raw images include:
>split lips after the fight (p. 4)
>the punch that breaks the jaw in pieces (p. 4)
>Your body just obeyed, crouch and clinch, the reflex against another body in its strike (p. 5)
>Before the violence of adulthood was the violence of childhood and before that a whole history of bloodshed as inheritance. (p. 5)
>My mother's Jesus and Reagan, my stepfather's beer and secretaries, their joint quest of catharsis in lusts and fistfights, headbutt and pulled hair (p. 6)
>Make love out of the kick and the punch (p. 7)
>every time I was hit or kicked (p. 9)
>In the end, they had all been frightened of her, how she rose from the blows, like the ring of a bell, unbreakable. (p. 10)
>So she's hit again. Hit once. Hit again when she ducks.
So her dad kicks her down the hall. (p. 10)
There are many more powerful scenes, although not wholly coherent, which may be an intentional approach to evoke the scattered thought patterns of a human mind living out of a cycle of trauma and violence. There are multiple mentions of rape and physical abuse (several poems mention being pulled by the hair). Interestingly, these images are often juxtaposed against pastoral images of countryside, wildflowers, creeks, Mennonites persons, and insects.
June 6, 2018
This collection is one of exorcism, ecstasy, of violence and desire. The speaker takes us into the wilderness of eastern Virginia (“all of it battlefield”), where an older boy “made for coming like a second coming” sexually abuses her as a child. This is her initiation into a cultural hellscape of obscene.
Men project their modern, pornographic fantasies of indulging and subduing the satanic. “Before the violence of adulthood was the violence of childhood,” she says, “and before that a whole history of bloodshed as inheritance.” In “Last Breath,” the speaker sees herself an “insurgent and fugitive girl made infinite,” both specter and incarnation of an emerging, radical resistance. This resistance is the heart of this violent collection, and what makes it so worth the unraveling.
Men project their modern, pornographic fantasies of indulging and subduing the satanic. “Before the violence of adulthood was the violence of childhood,” she says, “and before that a whole history of bloodshed as inheritance.” In “Last Breath,” the speaker sees herself an “insurgent and fugitive girl made infinite,” both specter and incarnation of an emerging, radical resistance. This resistance is the heart of this violent collection, and what makes it so worth the unraveling.
December 20, 2017
This latest collection is, in startlingly fresh form, what Heather Derr-Smith's readers have come to expect: explosive, vivid imagery of violence, resistance, and human connection, with a masterful command of the language. "Thrust" is poetry for an age of sorrow, an age of fury, an age of rediscovering our individual and collective power. A must-read.
February 11, 2020
This is the third collection I’ve read by HDS, and the strongest. It has the firmest identity, the loudest voice, the clearest imagery. It paints very bright, colorful images and then destroys them. There are moments in this collection that I’ll remember for some time.
March 1, 2018
I was lucky enough to hear the author read from this collection in person. These are dark poems but they're on important subjects and written with grace, honesty, and beauty.
July 20, 2018
sometimes the clauses are inspiring but most of the time they are sheer nonsense
March 26, 2019
2.5 stars
Too dark and violent for me, but there are some great lines throughout. I am not the intended audience.
Too dark and violent for me, but there are some great lines throughout. I am not the intended audience.
August 1, 2019
My favorite poet.
September 7, 2023
A collection of poems that focus on family, violence, assault, and survival.
from Glass Jaw: "The pass 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."
from Catherine's Furnace: "I know one thing. / I was worth beating down, a pulp. Someone wanted me so damn bad, / like a desire that was desperate, hogtied."
from The Quarry: "Some of them would still want to fuck, / but what I liked is how they seemed to me oblivious of their sex / in a way girls aren't allowed to be. The boys were bodies / of pure delight, a buzzing heat in the fiber and chord / of their nerves that I was barred from."
from Glass Jaw: "The pass 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."
from Catherine's Furnace: "I know one thing. / I was worth beating down, a pulp. Someone wanted me so damn bad, / like a desire that was desperate, hogtied."
from The Quarry: "Some of them would still want to fuck, / but what I liked is how they seemed to me oblivious of their sex / in a way girls aren't allowed to be. The boys were bodies / of pure delight, a buzzing heat in the fiber and chord / of their nerves that I was barred from."
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews