The melding of cultural experiences offers access to a unique and vibrant bicultural experience. The textures and sensuality of the poems' imagery create a portrait of a young woman's life and her exploration of body and mind. A stunning poetry debut from an immensely talented author.

    "Stephen Strom's photographs lead you to that place," writes Joy Harjo. "The camera eye becomes a space you can move through into the powerful landscapes that he photographs. The horizon may shift and change all around you, but underneath it is the heart with which we move." Harjo's prose poems accompany these images, interpreting each photograph as a story that evokes the spirit of the Earth. Images and words harmonize to evoke the mysteries of what the Navajo call the center of the world.

    Composed of text found in western novels published between 1840 and 1950 – the heyday of pulp publishing and a period of unfettered colonialism in North America – Injun then uses erasure, pastiche, and a focused poetics to create a visually striking response to the western genre.After compiling the online text of 91 of these now public-domain novels into one gargantuan document, Abel used his word processor’s “Find” function to search for the word “injun.” The 509 results were used as a study in context: How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What was left over once that word was removed? Abel then cut up the sentences into clusters of three to five words and rearranged them into the long poem that is Injun. The book contains the poem as well as peripheral material that will help the reader to replicate, intuitively, some of the conceptual processes that went into composing the poem.Though it has been phased out of use in our “post-racial” society, the word “injun” is peppered throughout pulp western novels. Injun retraces, defaces, and effaces the use of this word as a colonial and racial marker. While the subject matter of the source text is clearly problematic, the textual explorations in Injun help to destabilize the colonial image of the “Indian” in the source novels, the western genre as a whole, and the western canon.

    An eleven-year-old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s, as her family is gradually drawn to the front lines of the conflict. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college, one French and the other Lakota, each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce/Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone.Formally inventive, witty, and generous, the works in this singular debut collection draw on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life in the Americas.

    . . " In words drawn from urban and Navajo perspectives, Sherwin Bitsui articulates the challenge a Native American person faces in reconciling his or her inherited history of lore and spirit with the coldness of postmodern civilization.Shapeshift is a collection of startling new poetry that explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man. Through brief, imagistic poems interspersed with evocative longer narratives, it offers powerful perceptions of American culture and politics and their lack of spiritual grounding. Linking story, history, and voice, Shapeshift is laced with interweaving images—the gravitational pull of a fishbowl, the scent of burning hair, the trickle of motor oil from a harpooned log—that speak to the rich diversity of contemporary Diné writing."Tonight, I draw a raven's wing inside a circle measured a half second before it expands into a hand. I wrap its worn grip over our feet As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot." With complexities of tone that shift between disconnectedness and wholeness, irony and sincerity, Bitsui demonstrates a balance of excitement and intellect rarely found in a debut volume. As deft as it is daring, Shapeshift teases the mind and stirs the imagination.

    This is an amazing collection of erotic pleasures.

    From her modest forest home in Colorado, and venturing throughout the region, especially to her beloved Oklahoma, she introduces us to horses, packrats, snakes, mountain lions, elks, wolves, bees, and so many others whose presence has changed her life. In this illuminating collection of essays and poems, lightly sprinkled with elegant drawings, Hogan draws on many Native nations' ancient stories and spiritual traditions to show us that the soul exists in those delicate places where the natural world extends into human consciousness--in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of this morning's sunlight. Altogether, this beautifully packaged gift is a reverential reminder for all of us to witness and appreciate the radiant lives of animals.

    East Asia Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. "Her poems are not ironic. They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic. This is feminist surrealism loaded with shifting, playful linguistics that both defile and defy traditional roles for women"--Pam Brown

    In this beautifully written tale, a promising young politician, Grant Arliss, flees from this pressure-ridden life in New York City to the serenity of the desert’s open spaces.There, he finds not only a place to sort out his confusion but also a remarkable woman, unlike any he has met. In his eyes, Dulcie Adelaid is an aloof creature of the desert who relies only on herself. Challenged and yet inhibited by the desert’s unrelenting force, Arliss admires Dulcie’s instinctive ability to thrive in the harsh country. She also provides a spiritual sustenance that he has never found with any other woman. Together they engage in lively conversations about his political convictions and her beliefs and values. Inspired, Arliss returns to New York where he delivers eloquent speeches to an overwhelmingly supportive constituency.Placing Cactus Thorn in biographical, feminist, and literary perspective, Melody Graulich's commentary discusses how Austin’s themes are timeless in setting and moral tone. Foreword and afterword by Melody Graulich.

    Always striving to be a better, stronger person, Wagamese shared his journey through writing, encouraging others to do the same.Following the success of Embers, which has sold over fifty thousand copies since its release in 2016, this new collection of Wagamese’s non-fiction works, curated by editor Drew Hayden Taylor, brings together more of the prolific author’s short writings, many for the first time in print, and celebrates his ability to inspire. Drawing from Wagamese’s essays and columns, along with preserved social media and blog posts, this beautifully designed volume is a tribute to Wagamese’s literary legacy.

    . . . In glittering prose, Momaday recalls stories passed down through generations, illuminating the earth as a sacrosanct place of wonder and abundance. At once a celebration and a warning, Earth Keeper is an impassioned defense of all that our endangered planet stands to lose."  — EsquireA magnificent testament to the earth, from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday. One of the most distinguished voices in American letters, N. Scott Momaday has devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially its oral tradition. A member of the Kiowa tribe who was born and grew up on Indian reservations throughout the Southwest, Momaday has an intimate connection to the land he knows well and loves deeply. In Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land, he reflects on his native ground and its influence on his people. “When I think about my life and the lives of my ancestors, I am inevitably led to the conviction that I, and they, belong to the American land. This is a declaration of belonging. And it is an offering to the earth.” he writes.Momaday recalls stories of his childhood, stories that have been passed down through generations, stories that reveal a profound and sacred connection to the American landscape and a reverence for the natural world. In this moving and lyrical book, which includes original artwork by the author, Momaday offers an homage and a warning. He reminds us that the Earth is a sacred place of wonder and beauty; a source of strength and healing that must be protected before it’s too late. As he so eloquently yet simply expresses, we must all be keepers of the earth.

    Here, though, the poet's electric narratives and portraits extend beyond the working class streets of urban New Jersey. Modeling poems on the kundiman, a song of unrequited love sung by Filipinos for their country in times of oppression, he professes his conflicted feelings for America, while celebrating and lamenting his various heritageswhether by chatting up St. Patrick, riffing on race relations, or channeling Lapu Lapu in a rejoinder to Magellan. Passionate, provocative, and irrepressible throughout, My American Kundiman further establishes Rosal as a poet to be reckoned with.

    At times sensual, always potent, Lemons in the Chicken Wire delivers a collage of work that reflects rural identity through a rich medley of techniques and forms.It is an audacious, lyrical and linguistically lemon flavoured poetry debut that possesses a rare edginess and seeks to challenge our imagination beyond the ordinary. Alison Whittaker demonstrates that borders, whether physical or imagined, are no match for our capacity for love."Lemons in the Chicken Wire is truly an astounding, proudly experimental, innovative, daring, disjunctive, playful and unique poetry debut" – Dr AJ Curruthers, Rabbit Poetry Journal

    Facing the sudden loss of his father, Young pays homage to his significant clan: to aunties and double cousins, and a great-grandfather's grave in a segregated cemetery. At the book's heart is a series of highly original food odes, poems that grow out of hunger and pain and find a way to satisfy both. Whether in Ode to Pork (I know you're the blues / because loving you / may kill me) or in addresses to collard greens, catfish, and kitchen grease, Young counts his losses and our blessings, knowing inside / anything can sing. And Young is still singing the blues, though now with a touch of country and western, burnished by loss and a hard-won maturity, delivering poems that speak to our cultural losses, even as he buries his own, sadder than / a wedding dress / in a thrift store. What we love will leave us or is it we leave what we love, Today, belly full enough to walk the block after all week too cold outside to smile-- from I shall be released

    Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.