Dirt Eaters
Copyright © 2004
by Teri Grimm
University Press of Florida
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With vivid characters and striking details, the poems in Dirt Eaters recount 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.
Dirt Eaters seeks 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. — from the publisher
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
Teri Youmans Grimm's debut tells her own life story and those of her Southern rural
relatives. As in Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, the emotional weight derives
from her characters' accumulated experience: surviving a house fire, rejecting evangelical
Christianity, or feeling stranded and lonely at a school dance. Grimm's technique shows
in her judicious quotation from other speakers and in her diversity of forms, from
two-beat lines to expansive verse paragraphs to a tightly wound villanelle.
Turn-of-the-century ancestors' "chatty born-again ghosts" offer Grimm "a debt / no one
ever really counts on collecting"; the poet herself remembers wearing "my sister's
five-year-old / chiffon and pink polyester/ bridesmaid" dress as she competed
(successfully) for the title of "Miss Senior High Duval County." — New York Times
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