WHEREAS

WHEREAS

Author: Layli Long Soldier

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1555979610

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The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.


How I Discovered Poetry

How I Discovered Poetry

Author: Marilyn Nelson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13: 1101635398

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A powerful and thought-provoking Civil Rights era memoir from one of America’s most celebrated poets. Looking back on her childhood in the 1950s, Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist Marilyn Nelson tells the story of her development as an artist and young woman through fifty eye-opening poems. Readers are given an intimate portrait of her growing self-awareness and artistic inspiration along with a larger view of the world around her: racial tensions, the Cold War era, and the first stirrings of the feminist movement. A first-person account of African-American history, this is a book to study, discuss, and treasure.


Beyond the Fields

Beyond the Fields

Author: Randy Shaw

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0520268040

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Much has been written about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers' heyday in the 1960s and '70s, but the story of their profound, ongoing influence on 21st century social justice movements has until now been left untold. This book unearths this legacy.


At Play in the Fields of the Lord

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Author: Peter Matthiessen

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2012-05-02

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 0307819647

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In a malarial outpost in the South American rain forest, two misplaced gringos converge and clash in this novel from the National Book Award-winning author. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on the behalf of the local comandante. Out of this struggle Peter Matthiessen creates an electrifying moral thriller—adapted into a movie starring John Lithgow, Kathy Bates, and Tom Waits. A novel of Conradian richness, At Play in the Fields of the Lord explores both the varieties of spiritual experience and the politics of cultural genocide.


Rutted Field of the Heart

Rutted Field of the Heart

Author: Priscilla Wear Ellsworth

Publisher: Antrim House

Published: 2021-06-14

Total Pages: 70

ISBN-13: 9781943826865

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This is a emotionally charged tribute to the author's late husband, detailing his life and death as well as his reappearance in various guises. Rooted in the elegance and reality of nature and family, Priscilla Ellsworth's poems become a gift, a primer on 'how to live / and how to die.' In an early poem she chides, 'Husband, wake up!' She is a wife who wants her husband's presence. Life: travel with family, work in the garden with him, the joy of his peonies - 'What if we had lived like this all our days?' Death arrives midway in the book: 'So this is it.' That single line, poignant, direct, straight to the heart. The poem 'Dawn Fire' which follows with its description of hunters and needless death takes one's breath away. In 'New Widow, ' when Ellsworth writes, 'For now my heart is a garden that cannot be turned, ' she keeps us in the rhythm of the natural world: for all its death, it will bring spring. Here are poems to trust."


Cutlish

Cutlish

Author: Rajiv Mohabir

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 9781945588884

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"Rajiv Mohabir's Cutlish uses history to interrogate the word "home" and all that it might mean to those who thrive in spite of homophobia, stereotype, and xenophobia. These poems are grounded in definite time and space in a voice that refuses to be silenced, "They are vexed you survive; that you/rise up from the pavement..." But what I love most is read a poet as disciplined and committed as Mohabir as he transforms and reinvents himself in tone, in subject, and in line: "Let's get one thing queer-I'm no Sabu-like sidekick,/I'm the main drag. Ram Ram in a sari; salaam//on the street. I don't speak Hindu, Paki, or Indian,/can't control minds, have no psychic powers." Jericho Brown Cutlish, Rajiv Mohabir's stunning new collection, asks urgent questions about queer identities, diaspora and silence. Deeply grounded in 1838, the year the first ships brought indentured servants from India to Guyana, Cutlish reckons with the relationship between language and violence. These poems challenge the colonizer's English through Creole, Sanskrit, Hindi, Hindustani and Chutney songs, dazzling us at every turn: "May each face who ever said, Speak English / find their own tongue fettered and split, / my mixed blood blackening their faces." The book's title evokes the violence of a cutlass, and everywhere here we see language as knife and blade but also as solace. Cutlish is a luminous, beautiful book. Rajiv Mohabir is one of the most important poets writing today. --Nicole Cooley"--


Adam of Ifé

Adam of Ifé

Author: Naomi Cornelia Long Madgett

Publisher: Lotus Press (WI)

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13:

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Collection of poetry from Lotus Press. This ground-breaking anthology of poetry contains an informative foreword by the editor, Naomi Long Madgett, which traces the historical influences that have cast so many contemporary African American men in a negative light. The book is divided into eight sections: "Fathers," "Brothers, Sons and Other Youth," "Lovers," "Street Scene," "Beacons," "Music-Makers," "In Light and Shadow," and "In This Sad Place." Each of these section titles is preceded by a group of four portraits drawn by the late Carl Owens. This is an extremely important book that educates its readers, portraying African American men in many positive ways and denying the stereotypical images that too often prevail. The message is not overshadowed by the fine literary quality of the poems by 55 African American women. The title refers to Ifé, a city in Nigeria which, according to legend, was the birthplace of mankind.


In Praise of Plants

In Praise of Plants

Author:

Publisher: Timber Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780881925500

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Looks at such topics in botany as plant manipulation of animals, ecological genocide, and biologists' bias against plants.