A Brief History of the Midwest by Andrew Grace Reviewed by Christopher Blackman

A Brief History of the Midwest by Andrew Grace

Reviewed by  Christopher Blackman

Publisher: Black Lawrence Press

Publication Date: May 27, 2025

ISBN: 9781625571588

Page Numbers: 92

“History is really the history of thistle.” So begins the first and title poem of Andrew Grace’s newest poetry collection, A Brief History of the Midwest (2025). The title is hardly ironic: the poems in the book (Grace’s fourth) combine overlapping lyrics to form a chronicle of the region and the many ways its topography has tried, for hundreds of years, to destroy its residents. For Grace, the Midwest is, even today, a place less abstracted from the corporeal realities of life than others. Food is grown, caught and raised there. Winters are hard. Lives are lived and ended prematurely. From the 19th century pioneers struggling to survive in the wild, to present-day people dispossessed by deindustrialization and the opioid crisis, Grace’s Midwest is, like thistle, an oft-overlooked thing in the berm that still possesses a capacity to draw blood.  

People can be precious about the American Midwest. Like supernumeraries in a cosmic opera, its existence is treated as a type of mis-en-scène: evidence that a grand plot is transpiring in a fully-inhabited world, but elsewhere, and involving other, more important people. It’s a place defined as much by negations (neither the East, nor the West) as by the perceived stereotypes of its residents: wholesome, guileless, homespun casserole folks (think Fargo) with healthy self-deprecation and an “aw shucks” aversion to anything ostentatious. Midwesterners are therefore relegated to a swath of completely avoidable territory known as “the flyover states.” Yes, folks, things are happening in America–you just have to pass through the entire thing to find it. A Brief History of the Midwest is aware of what you might think of the Midwest, and it’s prepared to disabuse you of these notions.

Andrew Grace has long been a canny and pragmatic (another Midwestern virtue) poet. His previous collection, Sancta (Ahsahta Press, 2012) was a book-length poem comprised of 70-word prose sections that crackled in the confines of this imposed form.  Free from the strictures of the previous book, he uses the full field of the page in A Brief History of the Midwest without sacrificing any of Sancta’s precision. All this amounts to a polyphonic collection (call it “variations on a theme”) that gives Grace ample room to contend with subjects and images that most compel him. Accordingly, as in Sancta, grief pervades this collection. A Brief History of the Midwest is deeply haunted, and in close communion with its departed who refuse to fade from memory. Images of dilapidated farm structures appear beside the gruesome images of a tragic silo death in “For the Silo Boys.” The lean “What I Know” portrays the changing of day into night in a rural countryside as a ballooning mushroom cloud consuming the hills into its blast radius, conceding that “[w]e are only able / to understand one landscape.” In the poem “Do You Consider Writing to Be Therapeutic,” Grace writes:

                After my father died
                I should have gone to therapy.
                I tried instead to solve my grief
                with alcohol and poems.
                Now I am almost 40
                and all I can tell you about grief
                is that when I found my father
                on the floor of the machine shed
                the radio was on and wind
                pushed against corrugated metal.
                Of course I still hear it[...]

There is a saying: when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The speaker of the poem, a poet himself, is faced with the grief that has plagued him for years, and can still only offer us image– “wind / pushed against corrugated metal.” But not relief. Not resolution. Even in a poem, a speaker can’t do anything about the vagaries of life. An image–even a striking one–is only ever words on a page. 

Despite this momentary cynicism about the written word, A Brief History of the Midwest is conversant with its literary precedents: Pliny, Virgil, Homer, and Li Po each get a nod throughout the course of the book. The inclusion of these specific writers, each famed for their historical scope, signifies that the American Midwest is no less deserving of historical record and preservation than the Tang Dynasty, or Ancient Greece or Rome, inducting Grace and the collection within this broader tradition. But what’s also striking is the way Grace incorporates primary source texts, providing the work with rich textures beyond canonical histories alone. Excerpts of 19th century journal entries and memoirs written by Midwestern settlers introduce a layer of tension to the poems, and a disarming frankness–the daily weather reported as matter-of-factly as crop failures or the deaths of loved ones. 

The methods of demise may have changed, but life is still tenuous in the Midwest. Consider the lines in the long poem “Knox County,” where Grace ascends to his most-Lorine Niedecker-esque mode: “We live / softly / in a hard place.” This could be an apt description of the collection as a whole–despite it all, life still persists here, for a time. 

As in Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” Grace considers the landscape of the Midwest, grappling with a geological sense of history–the ways that it has shaped the land, and the ways the land has shaped the people. Grace’s Lake Superior here is the Kokosing River, which flows through Knox County. Again and again we see images of things submerged, then unwillingly plucked from the water, be they fish, livestock, or the revived users of newer, meaner synthetic opioids. The poem culminates with a vision of the past: one hundred years ago, women washing their panicking flock of sheep in the muddy banks. Grace concludes with the lines “between them / a flood // over which / they hang / minds in the air.” Compare the echo of this ending with the earlier poem “Not a Mile,” itself a riff on the ending of Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”: 

               …Not a mile
               From our classroom, men dissolve
               Like powder in water. Men so close
               We can’t see them. Men like air. 

Things are evaporating. Collapsing. Beyond saving. “There is no / Jesus Jesus enough for Ohio / according to billboards / announcing Ohio as simply hell,” begins the poem “Hell is Real.” Despite the incendiary title and the threat of damnation, the poem ends with a sort of Midwestern plea for salvation: “if only, heaven notwithstanding, / there was an Ohio Ohio enough.” Despite the doom, the collection never abandons its stubborn, abiding care for the region– across Illinois, Ohio, or Michigan, the poems never fail to convey the awe-inspiring splendor of the land. In life there’s a sense that we alone may speak ill of our family–a privilege we earn with our affection– Grace, a son of the soil, has earned the right to feel complicatedly about this region and its people, and the contradictions charge the poems in A Brief History of the Midwest. “Boyne River Daybook,” the truly stunning poem that concludes the book, is 25 sublime sections long. Fishing on the river, and therefore alone with his thoughts, the speaker of this poem passes the time contemplating the very transience of life (or rather, its fatal diagnosis). Near the end, the speaker concludes:

               Otherwise it’s just the so what prairie.
               A little blood in the air.
               Shelter here, mineral there, meaningless mercy.

Could life be so simple? In the next and final section of the poem, Grace answers the question he just asked. Having caught a trout, the speaker looks into its eyes and sees the blankness of the future:

                …In all your life you had a few hours free
                So you walked alone. You approached
                Wild animals. You saw the moment they chose to flee.

Everything leaves. What are we to do about it? Keep going. Keep surviving. What else is there to do except carry on, and be like thistle: persisting in the places they forget to mow, reminding yourself of that ancient Midwestern koan: it is what it is. 

Andrew Grace is the author of A Belonging Field (Salt Publishing), Shadeland (Ohio State University Press) and SANCTA (Ahsahta/Foundlings). His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Boston Review and New Criterion. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he is a Senior Editor at the Kenyon Review and teaches at Kenyon College. His fourth collection A Brief History of the Midwest is recently out from Black Lawrence Press.

Christopher Blackman is a poet from Columbus, Ohio. His poems have been published in Southeast Review, Sixth Finch, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily, among other places. His book of poems, Three-Day Weekend (Gunpowder Press) was longlisted for the 2025 Mass Book Award in Poetry. He lives near Boston. 

11 March 2026