Book picks similar to
When It Rains: Tohono O'odham and Pima Poetry by Ofelia Zepeda
poetry
20th-century
dustybotanist
indigenous-americans
Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story
LeAnne Howe - 2007
The story focuses on an Indian baseball team but brings a new understanding of the term "America's favorite pastime." For tribes in Indian Territory, baseball was an extension of a sport they'd been playing for centuries before their forced removal to Indian Territory.The story centers on the lives of Hope Little Leader, a Choctaw pitcher for the Miko Kings, and Ezol Day, a postal clerk in Indian Territory who travels forward in time to tell stories to our present-day narrator. With Day’s help, the narrator pulls us into Indian boarding schools, such as the historical Hampton Normal School for Blacks and Indians in Virginia, where the novel’s legendary love story between Justina Maurepas—a character modeled after an influential Black educator—and Hope Little Leader, begins.Though a lively and humorous work of fiction, the narrative draws heavily on LeAnne Howe’s careful historical research. She weaves original and fictive documents into the text, such as newspaper clippings, photographs, typewritten letters, and handwritten journal entries."LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings is an incredible act of recovery: baseball, a sport jealously guarded by mainstream Anglo culture, is also rooted in Native American history and territory...[Howe's] compelling stories and narratives...expose the political games of the 20th century that Native Americans learned to play for resistance and survival."—Rigoberto González, author (So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks and Butterfly Boy)
La Maravilla
Alfredo Véa - 1993
La Maravilla is the embodiment of belonging to two worlds, and of being torn between the love and fear of both. It is the condition and mystery borne by all who inhabit this American outback—whether they are Blacks, Chicanos, Asians, Native Americans, Mexicans, European immigrants, or Anglo misfits. For Beto, the young boy at the center of this magnificent story, it is the dilemma that he must somehow resolve and emerge from whole. For Beto has no parents to guide him—his mother has fled the "old ways" of her Mexican family for a bright new American life beyond the desert sunset in California, where "Indians are history and Sunday is for football, not church!" But in her place, and more than filling it, is Beto's aristocratic Spanish grandmother, a Catholic curandera with a passion for the music of Duke Ellington. He also has his grandfather, a Yaqui Indian whose spirit soars above a desert without frontiers. With this extraordinary first novel, Alfredo Vea, Jr., takes his place in the first rank of America
“All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - 2016
Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths such as:"Columbus Discovered America""Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims""Indians Were Savage and Warlike""Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians""The United States Did Not Have a Policy of Genocide""Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans""Most Indians Are on Government Welfare""Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich""Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol"Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance. Accessibly written and revelatory, "All the Real Indians Died Off" challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.
Pussy, King of the Pirates
Kathy Acker - 1996
In typical Acker fashion, he's including a text exchange with one of Acker's fictional heroines, Janey Smith, along with stories of their friendship and what Acker would think of everything now, today, "as the world begins to burn."
Mumbo Jumbo
Ishmael Reed - 1972
In it, Reed, one of our preeminent African-American authors, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy. Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture.
Skins
Adrian C. Louis - 1995
Louis's realistic novel of life on Pine Ridge Reservation, the story of two brothers--one a rez cop, the other an alcoholic--and their relationship with each other, with their people, with their environment. Chris Eyre's film version of SKINS is scheduled for release by Firstlook Pictures in August 2002. A cloth edition of SKINS was published by Crown in 1995. It is now out of print.
A Recipe for Sorcery
Vanessa Kisuule - 2017
It is a recipe for womanhood that changes with the whim of the seasons and the political climate. It is a feverish fistful of musings, a comedy of errors, an instruction manual, a compass, an overheard conversation in the ladies' loo, whispered secrets over a (second) bottle of wine. It is a lamentation, an homage to fellow women, at once a celebration of things to come and a mourning of things lost. It is a redefinition of what it is to be magical and otherwordly. It exposes the complex and contradictory impulses of the human spirit, the ugly tangle of emotions we must deal with in ourselves and also as a wider society. With frankness, humour and a decided fuck-you to fear, Vanessa digs deeper than she ever has to find something resembling sorcery.
The Daily Mirror
David Lehman - 2000
During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998. For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these "daily poems" -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes. A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.
Magic City
Yusef Komunyakaa - 1992
He portrays a child's dawning awareness of the natural and social order around him, rhythms of life in the community, the constant struggle for survival in the face of poverty and racism, the adolescent's awakening sexuality, the beginnings of the poet's awareness of his life and community as it exists in the context of history, and his emerging understanding of his own identity.
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
Sandra Cisneros - 1991
A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.
Catrachos: Poems
Roy G. Guzmán - 2020
In these unflinching, riveting poems, Roy G. Guzmán reaches across borders—between life and death and between countries—invoking the voices of the lost. Part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story, Catrachos finds its own religion in fantastic figures such as the X-Men, pop singers, and the “Queerodactyl,” which is imagined in a series of poems as a dinosaur sashaying in the shadow of an oncoming comet, insistent on surviving extinction. With exceptional energy, humor, and inventiveness, Guzmán’s debut is a devastating display of lyrical and moral complexity—an introduction to an immediately captivating, urgently needed voice.
Apauk, Caller of Buffalo
James Willard Schultz - 1916
An Indian boy by adoption, J. W. Schultz has told his paleface brothers many good Indian tales. "Apauk, Caller of Buffalo", was a lad in the land and the days of the great buffalo herds. Apauk. a Blackfoot boy. was taught when young the art of calling buffalo. A new type of the wooly, wild west Indian story appears in "Apauk, Caller of Buffalo." More thrilling than Action, the life story of the greatest of the Blackfeet medicine men, not only possesses an enthralling interest but gives the reader an authoritative historical picture of the life of the American Indian on the great western plains before the invasion of the white man. The biographer, James Wlllard Schultz, is an adopted member of the Blackfeet tribe and has lived the life of an Indian for forty years. Schultz writes: "ALTHOUGH I had known Apauk A—Flint Knife—for some time, it was not until the winter of 1879—80 that I became intimately acquainted with him. He was at that time the oldest member of the Piegan tribe of the Blackfeet Confederacy, and certainly looked it, for his once tall and powerful figure was shrunken and bent, and his skin had the appearance of wrinkled brown parchment. "In the fall of 1879, the late Joseph Kipp built a trading-post at the junction of the Judith River and Warm Spring Creek, near where the town of Lewistown, Montana, now stands, and as usual I passed the winter there with him. We had with us all the bands of the Piegans, and some of the bands of the Blood tribe, from Canada. The country was swarming with game, buffalo, elk, antelope, and deer, and the people hunted and were care-free and happy, as they had ever been up to that time. Camped beside our trading-post was old Hugh Monroe, or Rising Wolf, who had joined the Piegans in 1816, and it was through him that I came to know Apauk well enough to get the story of his remarkably adventurous and romantic youth. The two old men were great chums. Old as they were —Monroe was born in 1798, and Apauk was several years his senior—on pleasant days they mounted their horses and went hunting, and seldom failed to bring in game of some kind. And what a picturesque pair they were ! Both wore capotes ——hooded coats made from three-point Hudson Bay Company blankets—and leggins to match, and each carried an ancient Hudson Bay fuke, or flint-lock gun. They would have nothing to do with cap rifles, or the rim-fire cartridge, repeating weapons of modern make. Hundreds—yes, thousands of head of various game, many a savage grizzly, and a score or two of the enemy—— Sioux, Cree, Crow, Cheyenne, and Assiniboine, had they killed with the sputtering pieces, and they were their most cherished possessions. "Oh, that I could live over again those buffalo days! Those Winter evenings in Monroe’s or Apauk’s lodge, listening to their tales of the long ago! Nor was I the only interested listener: always there was a complete circle of guests around the cheerful fire; old men, to whom the tales brought memories of their own eventful days, and young men, who heard with intense interest of the adventures of their grandfathers, and of the “ calling of the buffalo,” which strange and wonderful method of obtaining at one swoop a whole tribe’s store of Winter food, they were never to witness. For the luring of whole herds of buffalo to their death had been Apauk’s sacred, honored, and danger-fraught avocation.
Veil: New and Selected Poems
Rae Armantrout - 2001
Veil contains poems from five of Armantrout's previous books as well as a generous selection of new poems. Her work relies tenaciously on the intelligibility of language, her careful syntax bordering on plain speech and meticulously scored lines always questioning how linguistic subjects are formed. Armantrout is interested in questions of origin, and the psychology of perception; she is interested in who is speaking and how we know what we know. Fans will welcome the chance to become reacquainted with her witty and lyric meditations on erotic and family issues, and new readers will be captivated by her poems' immediate availability and freshness.
At the Bottom of the River
Jamaica Kincaid - 1983
Her voice is, by turns, naively whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean--family, manners, and landscape--as distilled and transformed by Kincaid's special style and vision.Kincaid leads her readers to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child; the beauty and destructiveness of nature; the gulf between the masculine and the feminine; the significance of familiar things--a house, a cup, a pen. Transfiguring our human form and our surroundings--shedding skin, darkening an afternoon, painting a perfect place--these stories tell us something we didn't know, in a way we hadn't expected.
The Earth in the Attic
Fady Joudah - 2008
. . . Joudah's poems explore loss, displacement, suffering, and longing. They drift from the personal and specific to the larger stories of peoples and nations that Joudah encounters. . . . [His] unique talent is to offer poetry readers a look at a wounded and fractured world through his eyes."—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha,
The Institute for Middle East Understanding
Winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition, 2007In The Earth in the Attic Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American physician, explores big themes—identity, war, religion, what we hold in common—while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her Foreword as “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession . . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget.”