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Passionate and sensuous, these poems address both mind and body. The young Filipina poet proceeds with a sure understanding of the power of images to confront the instability of the world around her. Family, growth and decay, the politics of liberation are reflected with intensity.
In this volume legendary poet Charles Potts explores his Idaho roots and makes his meditation on family and geographical memory come full circle. Observant, scrupulous, passionate, and courageous, he describes his life as it embraces the lives and events that came before it.
These poems reflect years of observation: checking out the street, listening to talkers, getting inside the heads of family members, and locating an aesthetic in the work of others. Maisha Baton casts a wise eye on a chaotic world where the human is sometimes obscured.
In this tightly written poetic saga of a modern Comanche village in Oklahoma, the young narrator is surrounded by gambling thugs, drugged-out gangs, and memories of the glory days of warriors who tried to preserve the land. The tragicomic narrative mirrors a life neither easy nor forgettable.
Truth-telling with a homespun accent, these poems reflect the poet’s raising in a logging town in Washington state. Beneath the sweetness of some language is a sense of threat, endangered sexuality, and the need to create a makeshift existence to keep promise and courage alive.
This book of poems and family memories carries a bite: the author is an Oklahoma woman with a history of hard traveling and a feminist intellectual with a formidable critical vocabulary. Add in the heartbreak, lustiness, traditional wisdom, Okie determination, and Indian legacy of these poems and you have quite a bundle.
In these poems, Marianne Broyles acknowledges the historic oppression of Native Americans and other peoples, tracking the painful consequences. She also focuses on the resilience and surviving spirit of the people themselves. Mild in manner but clear in statement, she offers a strong cure: confronting tribulation and sorrow, she finds cause for empathy, service, and hope.
These poems reveal the heart of a survivor. In the title section, the poet, caught in “the unspoken language of pain,” escapes his beginnings only to find that the culture of violence has followed him. In the second section, “Meditations on Breath,” he charts his journey to survival. In the last section, “Walking into My Mind,” he contrasts the backbreaking manual labor of his day job with his real work, “to write/Love/Hold my children while rocking them to sleep/Children of the flesh/Children of the word.”