What do you think?
Rate this book
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.
- GenresPoetry
102 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 2021
18 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Lassell
5 books8 followersDaniel Lassell is the author of two poetry books: Frame Inside a Frame and Spit, winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 22, 2021
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this collection. Raw, authentic, interesting and finally for once in the world of poetry today, original. 'Taking in the Stray' is when I realized this was great work. The imagery is visceral, the language is perfected -there isn't a line that can be changed. Extremely recommended for anyone who appreciates poetry.
Thank you to NetGalley and Michigan State University Press for the opportunity to read this and provide my honest review.
Thank you to NetGalley and Michigan State University Press for the opportunity to read this and provide my honest review.
July 3, 2021
Chicken feathers in the barnyard dust. Barbed-wire and root cellars. Longing and belonging. A livelihood in extremis. These are the themes and images that course through Daniel Lassell’s remarkable collection of poems. Rereading them—and they are to be read again!—brings certain pleasures.
“Wheatgrass empties in wind, stems / leaning and rising, a rhythm of lungs. // Does everything wail like a body?” Where so much verse today is mired in hapless self-regard, or the politics of woe, Lassell’s alter-ego marches through the hardness of living with a stoicism that seems an ancient trait today. And yet, underlying all of it is a voice of vulnerability, one whose sensual attachment to the world provides harbor from the ever-lurking dread that nothing is forever. There will be a divorce, the loss of a family farm, exile to the cities. These can be viewed as life in retreat, or in the rays of optimism that shine occasionally, a growing into oneself. Lassell’s narrator opts for the latter. “Because the city has become / an embrace I prefer / and yes, what could grow does.”
Visually, too, these poems are arresting. The lines in several cascade down the page. The reader falls with them, sometimes so quickly he must begin again, looking for what might have been missed. It is worth the effort. Lassell’s tone is at once elegiac and humorous. He deftly cuts across mood with a sureness that becomes apparent the deeper into the collection one reads. The rewards become difficult to catalogue and after a while, it doesn’t matter anymore. Isn’t that the point of great poetry?
“Wheatgrass empties in wind, stems / leaning and rising, a rhythm of lungs. // Does everything wail like a body?” Where so much verse today is mired in hapless self-regard, or the politics of woe, Lassell’s alter-ego marches through the hardness of living with a stoicism that seems an ancient trait today. And yet, underlying all of it is a voice of vulnerability, one whose sensual attachment to the world provides harbor from the ever-lurking dread that nothing is forever. There will be a divorce, the loss of a family farm, exile to the cities. These can be viewed as life in retreat, or in the rays of optimism that shine occasionally, a growing into oneself. Lassell’s narrator opts for the latter. “Because the city has become / an embrace I prefer / and yes, what could grow does.”
Visually, too, these poems are arresting. The lines in several cascade down the page. The reader falls with them, sometimes so quickly he must begin again, looking for what might have been missed. It is worth the effort. Lassell’s tone is at once elegiac and humorous. He deftly cuts across mood with a sureness that becomes apparent the deeper into the collection one reads. The rewards become difficult to catalogue and after a while, it doesn’t matter anymore. Isn’t that the point of great poetry?
June 5, 2021
Daniel has always been an incredible writer. He has perfectly captured the feeling of leaving farm life behind to live the city life. Llama farms have always felt different from other farms and this collection of poems truly reflects it...or maybe you just had to be there.
September 16, 2021
This read was a personal one for me; a book that brought up an interesting memory that made me want to read it. You see, I will always remember what my mother said about llamas. This highly educated librarian had a fear of them, and she consistently told me and my sister to never go near them because they would do nothing but spit at us. As any child does, that piece of parental advice was absorbed and it became a “must do” for me. I made it a goal to at least once in my life walk up to a llama and attempt to make friends with it.
Now, at the age of fifty, I am granted this autobiographical collection by a poet who grew up on a farm where llamas happened to live and… I loved it. I really did. It was not only the ease of reading and the pleasantry of the flow and the rhythm of the poems, but it was also written so well that it reignited the hope that one day I will make friends with a llama because this author has been kind enough to give me the ultimate how-to guide.
The basic plot of the book focuses on a young man living on this farm surrounded by some of Mother’s Nature’s most lovely greenery, as well as some of her coolest animals. Using the poems in ways that show the disintegration of his parents’ marriage that ultimately ends in divorce, the reader experiences a myriad of emotions. After the divorce is finalized, the boy is forced to leave the beloved farm behind which creates, for lack of a better term, a hole in the boy’s heart. Those childhood memories, from the chickens sung to sleep by lullaby to the captive wolves next door to the herd of llamas learning to survive despite coyotes and a frenzied family – all of those reminiscences help keep the boy from the country alive in the land of the city.
From poem to poem, the collection touches upon the subjects of home, and how deeply important the meaning of that word and that place actually is. It offers snippets of the spiritual when it comes to needing support as the world changes all around us while we grow into adulthood. It explores aspects of health when it comes to both the body and Man’s ill treatment of the earth itself. And last, but not least, it gives those like me a new view of creatures who hold their own thoughts and feelings that are mostly ignored because they stand on four paws and not two legs.
As a prime example, from a poem that I will never forget, Daniel Lassell wrote “How to Pet a Llama.” Within the wondrous words and rhythm he presents is my very own how-to guide. “Llamas carry conversations as if seated in a rowboat before fog has lifted, as if pausing to hear the long echo after a good shout.” I released a long breath after those particular words because I saw in my mind those large llama eyes that seem to hold a wealth of knowledge behind them. I saw the raised chin, held in that position because of the respect they silently demand and deserve. It doesn’t bother me now if my llama spits when I meet him, because I don’t think it will. I will simply follow Mr. Lassell’s instructions to the letter and I will praise that author as my llama and I… “Stand, just the two of you. Let your breath mingle as in cold, the air on tiptoe.”
5 Stars! It is no surprise this man is the winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Emerging Poetry Prize and a 2021 finalist for the International Book Awards. He has far more on his horizon, and I am a new fan who will watch eagerly for the next treasure he releases.
Now, at the age of fifty, I am granted this autobiographical collection by a poet who grew up on a farm where llamas happened to live and… I loved it. I really did. It was not only the ease of reading and the pleasantry of the flow and the rhythm of the poems, but it was also written so well that it reignited the hope that one day I will make friends with a llama because this author has been kind enough to give me the ultimate how-to guide.
The basic plot of the book focuses on a young man living on this farm surrounded by some of Mother’s Nature’s most lovely greenery, as well as some of her coolest animals. Using the poems in ways that show the disintegration of his parents’ marriage that ultimately ends in divorce, the reader experiences a myriad of emotions. After the divorce is finalized, the boy is forced to leave the beloved farm behind which creates, for lack of a better term, a hole in the boy’s heart. Those childhood memories, from the chickens sung to sleep by lullaby to the captive wolves next door to the herd of llamas learning to survive despite coyotes and a frenzied family – all of those reminiscences help keep the boy from the country alive in the land of the city.
From poem to poem, the collection touches upon the subjects of home, and how deeply important the meaning of that word and that place actually is. It offers snippets of the spiritual when it comes to needing support as the world changes all around us while we grow into adulthood. It explores aspects of health when it comes to both the body and Man’s ill treatment of the earth itself. And last, but not least, it gives those like me a new view of creatures who hold their own thoughts and feelings that are mostly ignored because they stand on four paws and not two legs.
As a prime example, from a poem that I will never forget, Daniel Lassell wrote “How to Pet a Llama.” Within the wondrous words and rhythm he presents is my very own how-to guide. “Llamas carry conversations as if seated in a rowboat before fog has lifted, as if pausing to hear the long echo after a good shout.” I released a long breath after those particular words because I saw in my mind those large llama eyes that seem to hold a wealth of knowledge behind them. I saw the raised chin, held in that position because of the respect they silently demand and deserve. It doesn’t bother me now if my llama spits when I meet him, because I don’t think it will. I will simply follow Mr. Lassell’s instructions to the letter and I will praise that author as my llama and I… “Stand, just the two of you. Let your breath mingle as in cold, the air on tiptoe.”
5 Stars! It is no surprise this man is the winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Emerging Poetry Prize and a 2021 finalist for the International Book Awards. He has far more on his horizon, and I am a new fan who will watch eagerly for the next treasure he releases.
September 28, 2022
This book quietly kicked my ass.
I shouldn’t be using donkey language in a llama book, though!
I don’t know if llamas are big kickers…
For sure they spit, I learned. And hum.
They hum when they’ve got something to say.
They hum when happy. Or anxious or concerned or tired.
That’s what this book did! It sort of hummed, gently and powerfully.
It covered a lot of moods, and ground.
Farmland, especially. And on this farm are (other than the llamas)
(those sweet creatures of the author’s youth):
anger; fear; fighting; love; silence; peacefulness; contentment…
(“Everything…teeters between rage and forgiveness”).
My favorite group of poems in Spit is a stretch that starts with “Tasting Moonshine”
(a poem I love for its last three lines, its final stanza:
“...talking about the past, as if the past is a godly thing.
It’s not. And maybe what I hold in my empty palms
is sacred”) and includes “How to Pet a Llama,”
which could’ve been titled “How to Write This Book.”
Here, we learn to “Let your words
slowly out like twine,
like pulling colors from a sleeve,
like a sharing of troubled history.”
Then: “Tenderly, a llama hums—not as if
recalling the tune to a song,
but something longer lost.”
There.
I shouldn’t be using donkey language in a llama book, though!
I don’t know if llamas are big kickers…
For sure they spit, I learned. And hum.
They hum when they’ve got something to say.
They hum when happy. Or anxious or concerned or tired.
That’s what this book did! It sort of hummed, gently and powerfully.
It covered a lot of moods, and ground.
Farmland, especially. And on this farm are (other than the llamas)
(those sweet creatures of the author’s youth):
anger; fear; fighting; love; silence; peacefulness; contentment…
(“Everything…teeters between rage and forgiveness”).
My favorite group of poems in Spit is a stretch that starts with “Tasting Moonshine”
(a poem I love for its last three lines, its final stanza:
“...talking about the past, as if the past is a godly thing.
It’s not. And maybe what I hold in my empty palms
is sacred”) and includes “How to Pet a Llama,”
which could’ve been titled “How to Write This Book.”
Here, we learn to “Let your words
slowly out like twine,
like pulling colors from a sleeve,
like a sharing of troubled history.”
Then: “Tenderly, a llama hums—not as if
recalling the tune to a song,
but something longer lost.”
There.
February 12, 2024
“Spit” is a contracting lens describing the vastness of religion one moment before shrinking to spit in the dirt. it’s the moment of regret you feel when you look back down at the earth after stargazing. this is a tragically gentle book describing nature-bound brutality.
i met the author at AWP where he was kind enough to give me a copy for free as well as personalize/sign it. upon reading the poems, i noticed the author’s kindness shines through in the text. the transition of “taking in the stray” on page 30 to “taking care” on page 31 is more than clever word play, it’s a reflection of the emotional plea in this poetry collection: take heart, be kind, give to those around you even when they take, even when they hurt others, even when you are the one who is in need. Like spit, there is goodness in us all.
“Yet, I still remember the time you curled beside a fawn to guard it from coyotes. After you had eaten its mother.”
i met the author at AWP where he was kind enough to give me a copy for free as well as personalize/sign it. upon reading the poems, i noticed the author’s kindness shines through in the text. the transition of “taking in the stray” on page 30 to “taking care” on page 31 is more than clever word play, it’s a reflection of the emotional plea in this poetry collection: take heart, be kind, give to those around you even when they take, even when they hurt others, even when you are the one who is in need. Like spit, there is goodness in us all.
“Yet, I still remember the time you curled beside a fawn to guard it from coyotes. After you had eaten its mother.”
November 30, 2025
This poetry is good stuff. I was drawn by the cover and the free form of the poems and it did not disappoint. There is something cathartic in it, a chronicle of life from childhood to now, in poems that are both sentimental and ragged.
Some of my fav lines:
“What becomes wind
when the dead
live in it?”
“There’s a crowd in me that wants out, wants goddamn air.”
“Somewhere, the coyotes
untangle their teeth from tendons,
warming themselves
with the displaced light of others.”
“And it’s /everything/ that teeters between
rage and forgiveness, between the strings
of withheld logic.”
“I’m trying to find grace
in the sternness of a parking meter,
in crumbling sidewalk squares.”
And I marked sooo many more! I definitely need to pick up his next collection.
Some of my fav lines:
“What becomes wind
when the dead
live in it?”
“There’s a crowd in me that wants out, wants goddamn air.”
“Somewhere, the coyotes
untangle their teeth from tendons,
warming themselves
with the displaced light of others.”
“And it’s /everything/ that teeters between
rage and forgiveness, between the strings
of withheld logic.”
“I’m trying to find grace
in the sternness of a parking meter,
in crumbling sidewalk squares.”
And I marked sooo many more! I definitely need to pick up his next collection.
May 24, 2021
trigger warning
I had this theory that I don't get on with poetry because what I came across, especially in school and through popular names, is love poetry and I am aro-ace. A while back I read and enjoyed Mary Oliver's Dog Poems, so I jumped at the opportunity to read llama poems.
This is an autobiographical collection by a poet who grew up on a farm, where llamas lived for a long time.
I liked it. The flow of words, the rhythms. The topics discussed.
For some reason, I feel as if I had listened to chickens clucking while feeding.
The arc was provided by the publisher.
I had this theory that I don't get on with poetry because what I came across, especially in school and through popular names, is love poetry and I am aro-ace. A while back I read and enjoyed Mary Oliver's Dog Poems, so I jumped at the opportunity to read llama poems.
This is an autobiographical collection by a poet who grew up on a farm, where llamas lived for a long time.
I liked it. The flow of words, the rhythms. The topics discussed.
For some reason, I feel as if I had listened to chickens clucking while feeding.
The arc was provided by the publisher.
January 19, 2023
Lassell’s debut collection is one of the most original collections of poems I’ve ever read. Fixated on his parents’ Kentucky farm, Lassell uses the surrounding environment to help isolate and explore the human spirit. From the very beginning with “The Llama named James and John Sons of Thunder,” Lassell delivers a visceral punch as the speaker of these poems creates a unique connection between the human soul and the dangerous landscape where, in addition to llamas and chickens, human life exists safely, yet is always within the grasp of peril.
June 15, 2022
3.5
A quick and enjoyable poetry collection. I enjoyed reading these poems, and while for me they didn't quite stir the emotions I'd hoped for it to be a standout poetry collection. I am glad that I read it.
A quick and enjoyable poetry collection. I enjoyed reading these poems, and while for me they didn't quite stir the emotions I'd hoped for it to be a standout poetry collection. I am glad that I read it.
December 11, 2023
Lassell’s footing in narrative lyric is a dying breed. Which makes me sad. He writes with such a muscular sense of witnessing and yet gear shifts tonally to render the most accurate, visceral punch. One of the best books I’ve read the last few years.
May 22, 2021
A book of poems about life on Llama farm, really good
Read
June 26, 2021
Trigger & Content Warnings
Suicide mentioned
Suicide mentioned
July 13, 2021
Absolutely incredible.
July 23, 2021
I enjoyed this collection, the poems are hopeful but also show the hard work and endurance which goes into this country life. An easy and pleasant read.
July 7, 2021
I reviewed SPIT online for THE SHORE. You can read my review here: https://www.theshorepoetry.org/shore-....
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews