Land Acknowledgement : Print and Digital Resources

When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through

Edited by Joy Harjo

“There is no such thing as a Native American,” declares U.S. poet laureate Harjo, whose decades of writing and activism on the subject of indigenous peoples have generated the most comprehensive and nuanced anthology of Native Nations poetry to date. Harjo’s introduction provides historical context for such terms as Native American and American Indian, and clarifies that many poets of Native Nations identify primarily with tribal and cultural affiliations, which have close relationships to their traditional homelands. As such, the anthology groups poets by region, beginning with the Northeast, and moving across the continent, landing finally in the Southeast, with its deadly legacy of forced relocation and genocide. Each of the five sections includes a preface by a poet from the region, which provides further detail about each geographic area. Together with uncredited historical pieces and collectively authored verses, the anthology includes poems by established authors, such as N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, and showcases emerging voices, like Layli Long Soldier and Natalie Diaz, and also introduces relative newcomers, such as Jake Skeets and Tommy Pico. If there’s one poetry anthology that belongs on every bookshelf in this country called America, it’s this one.

The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems

By N. Scott Momaday

In the 50 years since his groundbreaking novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), won the Pulitzer Prize, Momaday has established himself as a preeminent voice in Native American literature. Momaday’s influential oeuvre includes novels, folklore, poetry, memoir, stories, plays, children’s books, and mixed media work, and this generous collection of new and thoughtfully selected older poetry showcases more than a hundred short poems, many consisting of a single stanza, energized by imagistic brevity: “In my dream, a blue mare loping, / Pewter on a porcelain field.” Enlivened by Momaday’s gift for depicting the natural world (“The patchwork of morning on gray moraine”) and situated against his sense of living mythology (“Time is the red rock and the blue cloud floating above Olijeto”), each poem reflects a lifetime of writing across the intersections of history, identity, and language. The collection also includes a section, “A Century of Impressions,” made up of one hundred haikus as well as a brief section on the famous Kiowa warrior, Sitting Bear. This accessible compendium allows readers to savor the life’s work of an unparalleled poet.

Habitat Threshold

By Craig Santos Perez

Celebrated as “a phenomenal ambassador for our island” by the Guam legislature, Chamorro professor, editor, and writer Perez explores environmental themes endemic to his island home and also to the inhabitants of other Pacific communities and the planet as a whole, such as carbon emissions, sea level rise, and the scourge of omnipresent plastics. Perez applies sharp wit and surprising humor through an expansive variety of forms, from a sonnet that recycles Neruda to a “geo-engineering lullaby” (“Hush little planet, don’t say a word, / Daddy’s gonna buy you an air filter”). He offers a concrete poem in the shape of an hourglass and haiku that zig-zag down the page (and one that simply asserts itself: “the world / briefly sees us / only after / the eye / of a storm / sees us”). But it’s perhaps the poems that speak tenderly about his wife and child that will, perhaps, move readers to action. A wickedly intelligent, endlessly talented poet, to be read alongside Daniel Borzutzky, Juliana Spahr, and Clarissa Mendiola.

Postcolonial Love Poem

By Natalie Diaz

Diaz follows her stellar debut, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), with another groundbreaking collection. Diaz’s electrifying poems buzz with erotic energy in lines that whisper privately to a lover (“Imparadise me.”) but also confront intensely complicated notions of attraction, often framed against this country’s ongoing imperialism: “an American drone finds then loves / a body.” Throughout, Diaz paints vivid landscapes, from the intimate, “middle-night cosmography of your moving hands” to the linguistic cartography of “Manhattan Is a Lenape Word.” As in her previous book, the speaker’s brother appears, as do other relations from her Mojave community, most notably in a series of prose reflections on the importance of basketball to reservation life: “Only a tribal kid’s shot has an arc made of sky.” Entire dissertations could be written about Diaz’s uses of light and color in this book’s lithe lyrics, from the exacting, evocative imagery (“My brothers’ bullet is dressed / for a red carpet / in a copper jacket”) to the book’s many corporal illuminations: “Blood-Light,” “Skin-Light,” “Snake-Light.” An unparalleled lyric work, with one of the sexiest lines of poetry ever penned, “in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake.”

Dissolve

By Sherwin Bitsui

Winner of the American Book Award, Bitsui skillfully translates many aspects of his Navajo heritage into verse, and this new collection is no exception. It is perhaps a more ambitious undertaking, as it consists of an initial, short poem, “The Caravan,” followed by “Dissolve,” a multisection poem that comprises the rest of the book and overflows with abundantly imaginative imagery (“the flattened field is chandeliered / by desert animal constellations”) and arresting depictions of familiar sensations, like that of “saltwater masks sweating / on our smeared faces.” The result is a complex and ephemeral combination of contemporary concerns (“we wear slippers of steam / to erase our carbon footprint”) and poetic objets d’art: “Jeweled with houseflies, / leather rattles, foil wrapped, / ferment in beaked masks / on the shores of evaporating lakes.” Interrupting the hallucinatory flights are injections of wry humor: “How self-indulgent that moon—always looking down.” As with his contemporary dg nanouk okpik (Corpse Whale, 2012), the only way to read Bitsui is to trust his poetic momentum and embrace his brilliant work.

New Poets of Native Nations

Edited by Heid E. Erdrich

Indigenous storytelling and poetry have flourished for millennia in the Americas, yet few U.S. residents can name a single native poet. Editor Erdrich (Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media, 2017) recenters this issue by narrowing the focus of this masterfully curated collection to “Twenty-One Poets for the Twenty-First Century,” as her generous, elucidating introduction explains. Several names, such as Layli Long Soldier, Craig Santos Perez, and Natalie Diaz, will stand out for fans of contemporary poetry. Jennifer Elise Foerster paints tactile and visionary images (“the sky a belt of blue and white beadwork”). Others, like dg okpik, draw on unusual experiences (“She and I make a bladder bag to draw water from the ice trench”). Even the contributor bios take a different approach, forgoing long lists of achievements and awards; instead, each poet recounts his or her lineage, relationship to a native tongue (if any), writers they regard as mentors, and other native poets they recommend. In this way, Erdrich extends the scope of the collection. An immensely important anthology that belongs in every library.

Whereas

By Layli Long Soldier

In 2009, President Obama signed a Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, which could have proven historically monumental, but the resolution was never read aloud, no tribal leaders received it, and the apology was subsumed in a Defense Appropriations Act. For this searingly intelligent, masterfully crafted, and unarguably important debut book of poetry, Long Soldier takes the Resolution of Apology as a bulwark against which to orient a poetic response. Blending prose and verse, writing in heritage language and foster tongue, playing with white space and marginalia, Long Soldier articulates an argument against the conventional framing of Native space surrounded and dominated by federal lands, hijacking legalese to resist this ongoing colonization. In the process, she generates singular and ineffable imagery: “I’m chewing at a funeral and. I’m nibbling my pulp knuckles.” Elsewhere, “A tick head burrows in the skin of a question.” A wickedly smart, necessarily solemn, and unmistakably urgent addition to a continually burgeoning canon of Native poetry, alongside such authors as Natalie Diaz, dg okpik, and Jennifer Foerster.

Manifestation Wolverine

By Ray Young Bear

Over the course of his 40-year career, poet and novelist Young Bear has been recognized for his outstanding contributions to Native American literature. As a member of the Meskwaki settlement in Iowa, Young Bear expresses feelings of isolation and loss shared by many Americans in the idiosyncratic vernacular of his tribal heritage. This comprehensive edition includes three complete collections—Winter of the Salamander (1978), The Invisible Musician (1990), and The Rock Island Hiking Club (2001)—as well as new work. Throughout, Young Bear’s poetic voice and subject matter evolve, from his early songs of life and celebration (“it was windy that day and spider webs / were in the air offering rides to the river”) to mid-career reflections on wartime service (“All I could think of / was the absence of my name / on a distant black rock.”) to later narrative forms, in which the character, Edgar Bearchild, assumes center spotlight. Young Bear’s new work includes “concrete poems,” which take the physical shape of their subjects, and provide a capstone to this volume. Highly recommended for aficionados of American poetry.