The Long Grass (Paperback or Softback)

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.

Lisa Rhoades's The Long Grass is the poetry of a feminist woman of faith, whose poetic fire was rekindled after the sudden early death of a close friend. These poems are of a piece with her earlier book, Strange Gravity, yet they represent another vision, another music that is at once calm and urgent, and absolutely breathtaking. Her poetry breathes in the air that is music, even as it sings the question "Why must the damaged world / impinge on this November day?" Her poems are the haunting psalms of our difficult days. —Aliki Barnstone, Poet Laureate of Missouri, author of Dear God, Dear Dr. Heartbreak and Dwelling

The Long Grass reveals an urban landscape by way of its fecund gaps....Our guide along the way is Demeter, the protagonist of a sequence plaited throughout this collection, who reminds us of the lively gods we are and all that we cannot be.  —Martha Serpas, author of The Dirty Side of the Storm

Lisa Rhoades 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.  —Ron Wallace, author of For Dear Life

A richness in coming round, in the cycle of the seasons, and the complex orbits of mother and daughter, make The Long Grass a book to read swiftly—perhaps in one sitting—and then to read more closely a second time, with even greater pleasure.  —Victoria Hallerman, author of The Aerialist