Thrust
Heather Derr-Smith

Winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award

This potent collection revisits a backwoods Virginia girlhood 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.

“Derr-Smith uses an intently packed, beautifully crafted pile-up of images to explore a rural Southern upbringing defined by the ugliness of abuse. In a world shaped by violence, by the casual male assumption of authority, and part of ‘a family of seekers, pick ax and lust,’ she's a girl pursuing the intensity of experience on her own terms”
—Library Journal, starred review

“...essential feminist and southern literature.”
—The Iowa Review

“This is poetry that is breathing: aliveness that is both measured and wild.”
—TC Tolbert

Heather Derr-Smith is the author of the poetry collections Each End of the World, The Bride Minaret, and Tongue Screw. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-486-7 / 62 pages / Poetry