A Domestic Anti-Cry: L. Reeman Reviews Berry Grass’s Hall of Waters
“Let’s get to the point,” Berry Grass begins in their premier collection, Hall of Waters, a series of prosaic micro-essays in terse, mournful conversation with rural Excelsior Springs, Missouri, where Grass spent their childhood as “[a] little boy that’s too much like a girl [and] too much like disposable,” and where Indigenous land appropriator and sculpture artist Donald Judd was raised.
This is the point, Grass emphasizes: “My hometown, like so much of America, is the product of black labor and black intellect, taken by whiteness & celebrated like white achievement.” Whiteness rushes to fill the spaces as it decimates what was already there. And there are costs. Grass echoes other working-class poets when they write, “[g]ood art gets government funding.” Money stays at the top of the oligarchic food-chain; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. As I am a white poet reviewing a white poet’s work, it is important to emphasize the ways in which that in itself takes up space. Whiteness will continue to inflict upon the earth until it is suppressed. Whiteness will be more easily suppressed if white people do the suppressing. Grass beseeches Judd to acknowledge their “[a]lkaline inheritance.” Judd purchased 40,000 miles in West Texas and refused even “to rent cattle grazing rights to ranchers,” to which Grass surmises, “people who were around […] still talk about your death as a kind of justice… [they] say the land found a way to liberate itself from you.”
This is the point: In accessible, descriptive language, Grass laments the choice of leaving, warning, “[a]n escape is never as clean as you’d like. You always leave something behind.” They mix form and function in this collection, using “hermit crab essays” (a term coined by Brenda Miller for “essays that used borrowed non-literary forms”) to explore the emotional topography of their familial houses, oscillating between geographic and platonic locations.
This is the point: Grass sings a domestic anti-cry of the transcend-gender: “How you were raised is not the same way you should raise others.”
Grass’s Hall of Waters will lead you to the honest history of Excelsior Springs, if only you will drink of it.
Linette Reeman is the author of, among others, INVENTION OF THE MOUTH (Dream Pop Press, 2019) and BLOODMUCK (The Atlas Review, 2018). they have placed first in competitions from Sundog Lit and Alternating Current Press, have work in the 2017 Bettering American Poetry anthology, and have performed everywhere from final stage at the Texas Grand Slam to basement shows in their hometown. they want to hear about your favorite bridge.
