{"product_id":"dirt-eaters-teri-youmans-grimm-9780813027241","title":"Dirt Eaters","description":"\"Teri Youmans Grimm's first collection of poetry is a marvelous beginning. She is a clear-eyed, bemused observer of her kinfolk. There is tenderness here, too. These poems will make you wish that all families, even those that don't deserve it, had such a wise, compassionate chronicler.\"--Judith Hemschemeyer With vivid characters and striking details, the poems in \u003ci\u003eDirt Eaters \u003c\/i\u003erecount the author's examination of her Cracker and southern ancestry in a way that extends beyond the familial to include a region and class sometimes maligned, sometimes romanticized, and often misunderstood. In these haunted, lyric narratives, culture, religion, and class collide. The resulting poems serve tribute to a place and its people through examination of sin and redemption, darkness and light, haves and have-nots, and shame and pride. The book was born of the consequences of leaving a place and family steeped in the history and traditions of the South. The poet, having moved to the Midwest, has become a sort of expatriate in her father's eyes, and she herself has underestimated the hold that home would have over her. These poems are a mystical journey back through her ancestry. The dead serve as conjurers and characters both real and mythologized throughout the collection--Uncle Seward, who uses dice and the Bible as a means of prophecy; blind Aunt Ater, who finds solace and doom in biblical numbers; an unlucky man facing certain death as he stands on an alligator's back; and women who gorge themselves on dirt--all find their way back to life in these poems. \u003ci\u003eDirt Eaters \u003c\/i\u003eseeks grace in the unlikeliest of people and places. Bound up with the peculiar, however, is the poet's own desire to reconcile the handed-down shame and faulty pride within herself as well as the religion of the ecstatic within her own quiet questioning. Teri Youmans Grimm, a former instructor at the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, is editor-at-large with Zoo Press.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Teri Youmans Grimm\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0813027241\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780813027241\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University Press of Florida\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 06\/05\/2004\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 80\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.24lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.48h x 5.46w x 0.24d","brand":"Teri Youmans Grimm","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":43926377529599,"sku":"9780813027241","price":12.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/products\/img_31be58fb-59ff-42f6-8866-acd2fd918dbe.jpg?v=1681082741","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/dirt-eaters-teri-youmans-grimm-9780813027241","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}