Staff Picks
Native American Heritage Month: Poetry
- Megan M.
- Wednesday, November 01, 2023
Collection
Celebrate with poetry!
Living Nations, Living Words
An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry
Published in 2021
"A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. With work from Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, Layli Long Soldier, among others, Living Nations, Living Words showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, "poetry [that] emerges from the soul of a community, the heart and lands of the people. In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than 500 living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.""-- Provided by publisher.
Dissolve
Published in 2019
Bitsui's poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry." --Library Journal Drawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve is urban and rural, past and present in the haze of the reservation. Bitsui proves himself to be one of this century's most haunting, raw, and uncompromising voices.
Instruments of the True Measure
Poems
Published in 2018
"A poetic journey through time, space, and place of the Shawnee people by American Book Award-winning poet Laura Da̕"--Provided by publisher.
The Pemmican Eaters
Poems
Published in 2015
A picture of the Riel Resistance from one of Canada's preeminent Mťis poets. With a title derived from John A. Macdonald's moniker for the Mťis, The Pemmican Eaters explores Marilyn Dumont's sense of history as the dynamic present. Combining free verse and metered poems, her latest collection aims to recreate a palpable sense of the Riel Resistance period and evoke the geographical, linguistic/cultural, and political situation of Batoche during this time through the eyes of those who experienced the battles, as well as through the eyes of Gabriel and Madeleine Dumont and Louis Riel. Included in this collection are poems about the bison, seed beadwork, and the Red River Cart, and some poems employ elements of the Michif language, which, along with French and Cree, was spoken by Dumont's ancestors. In Dumont's The Pemmican Eaters, a multiplicity of identities is a strengthening rather than a weakening or diluting force in culture.
Little Big Bully
Published in 2020
"Poet, artist, filmmaker, and curator Heid E. Erdrich explores the indigenous experience in multifaceted ways-personal, familial, biological, cultural. These poems, written from the perspective of an Ojibwe woman, reveal what sustained harassment does to people, especially to women, children, and Native and Indigenous people, how it can lead to the oppression of others and even ourselves, and how experiencing misogyny and sexual abuse can make a person vulnerable to future abuse"-- Provided by publisher.
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
Fifty Poems for Fifty Years
Published in 2023
A magnificent selection of fifty poems to celebrate three-term US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo's fifty years as a poet.
Creeland
Published in 2021
Creeland is a poetry collection concerned with notions of home and the quotidian attachments we feel to those notions, even across great distances. Even in an area such as Treaty Eight (northern Alberta), a geography decimated by resource extraction and development, people are creating, living, laughing, surviving and flourishing--or at least attempting to. The poems in this collection are preoccupied with the role of Indigenous aesthetics in the creation and nurturing of complex Indigenous lifeworlds. They aim to honour the encounters that everyday Cree economies enable, and the words that try--and ultimately fail--to articulate them. Hunt gestures to the movements, speech acts and relations that exceed available vocabularies, that may be housed within words like joy, but which the words themselves cannot fully convey. This debut collection is vital in the context of a colonial aesthetic designed to perpetually foreclose on Indigenous futures and erase Indigenous existence."-- Provided by publisher.
Rose Quartz
Poems
Published in 2023
"A wild, seductive debut collection that presents a powerful journey of struggle and healing-and a spellbinding brew of folklore, movies, music, and ritual"-- Provided by publisher.
The Death of Sitting Bear
New and Selected Poems
Published in 2020
"One of the most important and unique voices in American letters, distinguished poet, novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller N. Scott Momaday was born into the Kiowa tribe and grew up on Indian reservations in the Southwest. The customs and traditions that influenced his upbringing-most notably the Native American oral tradition-are the centerpiece of his work. This luminous collection demonstrates Momaday's mastery and love of language and the matters closest to his heart. To Momaday, words are sacred; language is power. Spanning nearly fifty years, the poems gathered here illuminate the human condition, Momaday's connection to his Kiowa roots, and his spiritual relationship to the American landscape. The title poem, "The Death of Sitting Bear" is a celebration of heritage and a memorial to the great Kiowa warrior and chief. "I feel his presence close by in my blood and imagination," Momaday writes, "and I sing him an honor song." Here, too, are meditations on mortality, love, and loss, as well as reflections on the incomparable and holy landscape of the Southwest. The Death of Sitting Bear evokes the essence of human experience and speaks to us all"-- Provided by publisher.
Dream Drawings
Configurations of a Timeless Kind
Published in 2022
"From Pulitzer Prize winner and celebrated American master N. Scott Momaday, a collection of 100 new prose poems, rooted in Native American oral tradition, along with 5-7 pieces of art by the author"-- Provided by publisher.
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
Poems
Published in 2019
Selected by Kathy Fagan as a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is a debut collection of poems by a dazzling geologist of queer eros. Drunktown, New Mexico, is a place where men 'only touch when they fuck in a backseat.' Its landscape is scarred by violence: done to it, done on it, done for it. Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, 'the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.' But if Jake Skeets's collection is an unflinching portrait of the actual west, it is also a fierce reclamation of a living place'full of beauty as well as brutality, whose shadows are equally capable of protecting encounters between boys learning to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover's body: A spine becomes a railroad. 'Veins burst oil, elk black.' And 'becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal.' Rooted in Navajo history and thought, these poems show what has been brewing in an often forgotten part of the American literary landscape, an important language, beautiful and bone dense. Sculptural, ambitious, and defiantly vulnerable, the poems of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers are coal that remains coal, despite the forces that conspire for diamond, for electricity.