Water the Bones

Water the Bones is a ceremony in the wasteland; a sacred libation of holy water poured out of the dry midwestern soil. In this collection, poet and essayist MariJean Elizabeth Wegert spells a liturgy for the Midwest, tracing its stories along the fault lines of the landscape and the humans who inhabit it. The poems are both grieving ceremony and dowsing spell; invocation and exorcism; the healing and howling of two fractal bodies whose stories map and mirror one another.

Drawing from a haunted spiritual lineage of evangelical Christianity: the biblical stories of the old and new testaments; the lineage of her ancestors: European pre-Christian practices and mythologies; and the lineage of an animate, breathing land of the Midwest and its displaced indigenous tenders, these poems invoke both the spirits of place and those who walk on it to re-member what lives and lay to rest what doesn’t.