beneath the new surface of trendy shops
and friendly folks invisible war is waged.
war on red woods, war on red
people, war on poverty
and impoverished, war on drugs,
war on war. there must be a place
for free range deer
for grass growing wild and free
for lobelia and fuchsias, for deathly
rhododendrons, for longing and rage
in this place of seven thousand
mad whited-out souls and three
hundred mad indians nobody recognizes.
just look around and see what is
now, what
should be, could have been, what’s
the use.
there is reason enough for indians
to go mad
whited out over centuries. for water
to get sullen and refuse to flow, for
grass to sulk. . . . even the sky
is crazy with rage,
even the earth goes mad.
—“America the Beautiful”
These poems, written in the last decade of Paula Gunn Allen’s life and the first years of the new century, capture the variety, ingenuity, and complexity of this beloved and influential Native American critic and poet.
In the lexicon of Paula Gunn Allen, what makes America beautiful may come as a surprise: its horrors confront its hopefulness; its absurdities challenge its promise.
A powerful, sustained lyrical and narrative sequence written in the midst of political and personal catastrophe (the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, a disastrous home fire, her own battle with lung cancer), Allen’s last book of poems is at once a bonfire made up of the ruins of civilization, a call for one more effort to set things right, and a gift to us all from this fertile and generous writer.
Paula Gunn Allen, Laguna Pueblo / Lebanese, was born in Cubero, New Mexico in 1939.
Two earlier volumes of her poetry, Skins and Bones (1988) and Life Is a Fatal Disease (1997), were published by West End Press.
She completed the manuscript for this book a week before her death on May 29, 2008 in Fort Bragg, California.
