Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse

I liked Out of the Dust much more than I thought I would when I read the first few pages and realized I was about to read more than 200 pages of poetry.

All throughout high school and college, I wrote terribly earnest poetry that I later realized was mediocre at best and thoroughly boring most of the time.  I was one of those kids who carried around Rimbaud books because I thought it made me look smart and hip and literate, when really all it meant was that I had read the Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive while on vacation with my family in Cleveland.

Poetry is extremely tough to get right.  When it's good it's really good, and when it's bad it's really, really, really bad.  I have read enough bad poetry in workshops, and heard enough bad poetry in coffeeshops, and have been asked to "proof" enough bad poetry by my English major friends that unless you are writing some seriously next-level poetry, I am probably not interested in it.  I highly encourage you to write it!  Just please do not make me read it.

So I was unsure what exactly Out of the Dust stood to gain from being constructed as a series of poems.  Would it add depth to the characters?  Would it make the plot cleaner?  Would it bring out the details of the scenery or the setting?  I had my doubts.  And honestly, I don't think it did any of things, but I think that actually made it a better book.

Stay with me here:  the entire book essentially takes place inside a huge dust storm.  It's the story of a family in Oklahoma during the mid-1930s, told from the perspective of the young daughter, an only child.  The father is taciturn, the mother frustrated.  Their lives are a hardship, to be sure.  The farm is failing, and it's a constant, pitched battle to keep the dust out of your eyes, out of the machinery, off of your food, etc.  The shifting dust obscures entire landmarks, literally changing the geography of the novel.  Midway through the novel, a horrible tragedy occurs.

By using poetry as her medium, I thought Hesse was able to amplify the central image of the story, which was basically living inside a giant cloud of dust.  Things aren't clear; the future is uncertain, food is uncertain, relationships are uncertain.  Life itself is not certain.  There are several points in the book where the dust becomes so thick that the characters literally cannot see the road ahead of them.  The spareness of the poems emphasizes this uncertainty by withholding the kind of clarity you would expect from typical first-person prose.  The reader gets quick snatches of the narrator's thoughts, of imagery, as if there were a blowing storm obscuring his or her view of the path forward.  Quite a nice effect.

In her initial email suggesting Out of the Dust, Cassie recommended The Worst Hard Time as a readalong and I completely agree.  It's a non-fiction account of the exact period that Out of the Dust covers, and will give you quite a bit of insight into life in the Dust Bowl.  This next suggestion is a bit farther afield, but I would also recommend The Accidental Capitalist by Behzad Yaghmaian.  Yaghmaian travels to the cities in China that are attracting huge migrant populations and talks to the people who have come there to find a better life than the one available to them in the rural farming areas.  The stories are full of the same hardship and hope that fill the lives of the characters in Out of the Dust.

So far in this little project I have tackled not only fiction, which I had almost given up on, and poetry, which I had discarded completely.  I still wouldn't call myself an enthusiast, but I am definitely finding myself willing to consider books that I would not have given a second glance one month ago.