Native Lit in Review
Check out the following book reviews from our reviews section that feature new anthologies, poetry collections, and works of fiction by Native writers. For more reading ideas, check out our Native Lit Nota Benes below!
The Turtle’s Beating Heart
“Denise Low’s The Turtle’s Beating Heart invites you to watch as she looks into the complexities and moving patterns of diaspora, social pressure, and cultural shift. The author is fearless.” – Kim Shuck
The Last Pow-Wow
That Native Thomas & Steven Paul Judd
“Thomas and Judd’s world is full of coyote men, owl witches, Crazy Horse’s dog, and even Native Americans who have never been to a powwow. In chapters that are slyly hilarious, readers watch as all these characters make their way to the powwow in the title.” – Ursula Pike
Monahsetah, Resistance and Other Markings on Turtle’s Back: Lyric History, Poems and Essays
“Maurice Kenny’s final collection, a lyric jaunt through history and memoir, serves as an important bookend to his creative legacy. Kenny’s significance as a poet, short-fiction writer, editor, and mentor cannot be overstated.” – Lisa Tatonetti
Chiapas Maya Awakening: Contemporary Poems and Short Stories
Sean S. Sell & Nicolás Huet Bautista
“Chiapas Maya Awakening, edited by Sean S. Sell and Nicolás Huet Bautista, with translations from Tsotsil and Tseltal, curate the best of poets like Manuel Bolom Pale and fiction writers like Alberto Gómez Pérez.” – Anthony Seidman
A Listening Wind: Native Literature from the Southeast
“The book does not follow a template; storytellers and essayists were not given a theme or prompt. Each included tribe followed its own criteria, editing and deciding which works would be included.” – Douglas Suano Bootes (Saponi-Catawba)
A Thousand Horses out to Sea
“There is a drum in the back of this poetry—a constant pounding through images of blood, hands, fingers, and skin. The poems detail specific intimacy with masculine violence that is at once unsettling and a perfect allegory for the history of indigenous people in the United States.” – Sarah Warren
Native Lit Nota Benes
Diane Glancy
The Collector of Bodies: Concern for Syria and the Middle East
Resource
A volume that can be read as an expansion of The World Is One Place (see below), The Collector of Bodies delves deeper into Glancy’s own experiences in visiting Syria, combining the sense of wonder that often accompanies travelogues but informed by a gifted poet’s troubled vision of the future; a vision that became a reality when the country descended into a chaos of civil war from which it has yet to emerge.
Janet Rogers
Totem Poles and Railroads
ARP Books
This collection of verse from the former poet laureate of Victoria, British Columbia, places the relationship between the personal and the institutional at the center of her creative expression. Focusing her verse through the lens of the indigenous experience, Rogers navigates the treacherous waters between the erudite and the intimate with impressive poise. The result is poetry with an impact that lingers beyond the final line.
Drew Hayden Taylor
Take Us to Your Chief
Douglas & McIntyre
Take Us to Your Chief is a collection of science-fiction short stories with a distinct indigenous twist. With a measured and approachable tone that reveals the author’s love for classic sci-fi writers (Verne, Wells, Asimov), Take Us to Your Chief effortlessly buttresses Taylor’s argument that the philosophies and belief-systems of indigenous peoples can provide rich raw material for speculative fiction.
The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East
Ed. Diane Glancy & Linda Rodriguez
BkMk Press
The poetry in this anthology exhibits the urgency that Voltaire once ascribed to God, in that if it didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it. Given the synchronicities between the displaced peoples of the Middle East and the Americas, it is a testament to Glancy and Rodriguez’s vision that drew these powerful poems (including work by Joy Harjo and Allison Hedge Coke) into a single, timeless collection.
Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac
Beyond Elsewhere
Trans. Hélène Cardona
White Pine Press
Beyond Elsewhere is a breathless testament to the transcendent power of love, ranging as it emerges from the poet’s pen, from the attraction between individuals to the diffuse but unmistakable connection between the soul and the universe from which it emerges and for which it serves as a kind of holy mirror. Cardona’s translation captures Arnou-Laujeac’s fervor in this series of prose poems that have captivated the attention of the French literati.
Alessandro Barbero
The Anonymous Novel
Trans. Allan Cameron
Vagabond Voices
Italian novelist Alessandro Barbero masterfully re-creates the zeitgeist of Gorbachev’s Russia through an array of carefully crafted and dynamic characters. Through the author and translator’s lyrical, detailed prose, we are transported to snowy Moscow in the early 1990s, where we come to appreciate an often-overlooked time in Russian history while learning to love the unexpected interconnectedness of the human condition.
