Review of Water the Bones by Curtis L. Crisler author of Doing Drive-bys on How to Love in the Midwest & Indiana Poet Laureate

In Water the Bones: A Liturgy for the Midwest, MariJean Wegert excavates, like an archaeologist,  a lost connection—a juxtaposition of the human body to nature’s body. Realizing the space we believe between them isn’t there at all. Part 1: The Wilderness is the longest section in the book and wrestles with marriage, family, reality, spirituality, religion, myth, fact, and fiction through the lens of a survivor/healer. Wegert begins the book with the first poem, “Love Poem to the Midwest.” This poem examines what home is, what home means, and what home is missing. The final stanza moves us into the chaos of humanity, emphatically ruminating—

It’s a screaming void now,

where people go to be erased.

Where erased people go 

to feel

at home.

Buttressed by an epigraph of Gertrude Stein—“There is no there there,” Wegert hits us in the face with a love poem seemingly searching for love but supplying us with a Midwest wrestling for a connection with self/surroundings—disregarding the buried bones and footprints of tribal natives who honored what was taken from them. And we are in! Not only dealing with memory, but also dealing with the loss of who we fully are.

In “You Are What You Eat,” Wegert exhibits a universally-confessional-tone by a woman in a dire relationship. The first two lines kick—“We all need to be seen, and the only thing left to see me/ was the dirt.” There’s more to this woman’s excavation from patriarchy by poem’s end:

                                    my body

                                    fallow

                                    like a field.

What is Wegert searching for in her wilderness? How did she get here? And, how does she escape? “Wound Healer” believes the following:

—when you’re

haunted by visceral wounds how do you 

begin the work of stitching them up

without going in—

without cutting deep?

Wegert’s narrator answers the above in “The Eagle Speaks to My Inner Child About the City Wabash, Indiana, 2020,” as she affirms:

The earth knows you because it is made of you.

Element and ether. It wants you free.

Part 1I: The Water splashes—invigorates a self-actualization, where a wetness moves Wegert into professing a healing of self—loving self and understanding fear can ebb through knowledge just by listening to the body. How else can she come to know— 

my body

is a goblet, full of wine that no one’s drinking, though I’ve

offered and offered and offered

and so

she will be a libation—spilling from the edges…”

Wegert drowns, diving into self. Dexterous, in the language of the body, her narrators share body with land. In interrogatory poems like “The Gardener’s Turn to Preach Topic: The Etymology of Original Sin” and “to my daughter, when you’re trying to decide,” or the epistolary, “I Don’t Want to Be a Sin-Eater Anymore, I want to Feast: A Letter to Augustine,” Wegert supplants the belief and disbelief of religion, myth, and experience—expressing how her poem’s bodies and minds travail, and how her poetics accept the new reliance and passion they act upon— 

I’m cutting this tether now. You keep swallowing your

stones of grief. I am taking this leap. 

I might be hurled off into a new direction, I might find

everything or nothing, but I don’t have to walk the same

worn tracks of my own sadness anymore. I’ll still have my

arms out wide for the world, but this time I will let it hold

my weight instead of the other way around. 

And remember the words in that precious book of yours?

—the other side of the wasteland is jubilee? I will let

myself believe that now.

Look: water is coming up out of my footprints. Look: fruit

is blossoming from the limbs of my hands.

Part III: The Well ignites a deathblow with “Whoever Told You You Were Basic Was Lying,” as Wegert formulates—

The best feasts are the ones you prepare with your own

hands.)

You remember that your heart wants to beat and your skin

wants to sweat, 

You want to feel your muscles grow. 

Wegert’s poetry consecrates women’s bodies, minds, and souls. This corporeal sister implores healing from relationship-produced-traumas to a familial connection with earth, community, and self. Wonderment is where Wegert wanders. A fine place to find her, wailing at the moon.