Native North American Voices: Poetry

In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country.
Joy Harjo is an enrolled member of the Creek tribe.

This collection of poetry is inspired by the author's lineage as an Iñupiaq Eskimo woman with family from King Island and Mary's Igloo, Alaska. The poems' syncopated cadences and evocative images bring to life the exceptional physical and cultural conditions of the Arctic and sub-Arctic that have been home to her ancestors for tens of thousands of years, while the poems' speakers refer to an indigenous identity that has become increasingly plural.
Joan Kane is an Inupiaq descendant.

A self-proclaimed "vessel in which stories are told from time immemorial," poet dg nanouk okpik seamlessly melds both traditional and contemporary narrative, setting her apart from her peers. The result is a collection of poems that are steeped in the perspective of an Inuit of the twenty-first century--a perspective that is fresh, vibrant, and rarely seen in contemporary poetics.
dg nanouk okpik is an Inupiaq-Inuit descendant.

One of the most important and unique voices in American letters, distinguished poet, novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller N. Scott Momaday was born into the Kiowa tribe and grew up on Indian reservations in the Southwest. The customs and traditions that influenced his upbringing--most notably the Native American oral tradition--are the centerpiece of his work.
N. Scott Momaday is a member of the Kiowa tribe.

Drunktown, New Mexico, is a place where men "only touch when they fuck in a backseat." Its landscape is scarred by violence: done to it, done on it, done for it. Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, "the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all."
Jake Skeets is a Navajo descendant.

On the night before he "walked on," Margo Tamez's father recorded two questions onto a cassette tape: "Where did all the good men go? Where did they go?" Two decades later, Tamez reconstructs her father's struggle to "be a man" under American domination, tracing the settler erasure, denial, and genocide that he and preceding generations experienced.
Margo Tamez is an enrolled citizen of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas.

In richly detailed poems of wolf girls and feral boys, green children, and polar explorers, mermaids, orphans, and moth collectors, Janet McAdams explores the vexed relationship between human and non-human nature, between body and land. How to understand the voice lost between forest and city, which cries, "I am not wild, I am not human."
Janet McAdams is a Creek descendant.

In language as perceptive as it is poignant, poet Gwen Nell Westerman builds a world in words that reflects the past, present, and future of the Dakota people. An intricate balance between the singularity of personal experience and the unity of collective longing, Follow the Blackbirds speaks to the affection and appreciation a contemporary poet feels for her family, community, and environment. With touches of humor and the occasional sharp cultural criticism, the voice that emerges from these poems is that of a Dakota woman rooted in her world and her words.
Gwen Nell Westerman is Dakota, enrolled with the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Throughout this clear-eyed collection, Hogan tenderly excavates how history instructs the present and envisions a future alive with hope for a healthy and sustainable world that now wavers between loss and survival. A major American writer and the recipient of the 2007 Mountains and Plains Booksellers Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award, LINDA HOGAN is a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, teacher, and activist who has spent most of her life in Oklahoma and Colorado.

In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
Abigail Chabitnoy is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska.

Award-winning Nisga'a poet Jordan Abel's third collection, Injun , is a long poem about racism and the representation of indigenous peoples. 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.
Jordan Abel is a First Nation Nisga'a tribe descendant.

IRL asks, what happens to a modern, queer indigenous person a few generations after his ancestors were alienated from their language, their religion, and their history? Teebs feels compelled towards "boys, burgers, booze," though he begins to suspect there is perhaps a more ancient goddess calling to him behind art, behind music, behind poetry.
Tommy Pico is a member of the Kumeyaay Nation.

It was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson's debut collection of poetry.
jaye simpson is a Two-Spirit Oji-Cree person of the Buffalo Clan with roots in Sapotaweyak and Skownan Cree Nation.

Little Big Bully begins with a question asked of a collective and troubled we - how did we come to this? In answer, this book offers personal myth, American and Native American contexts, and allegories driven by women's resistance to narcissists, stalkers, and harassers. These poems are immediate, personal, political, cultural, even futuristic object lessons.
Heid E. Erdrich is Ojibwe and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details - motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic - negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing frontiers through fragmentation and interpretation of conventional lyric expectations.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island (Ugiuvak) and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska.

NATIVE VOICES is a comprehensive collection of the most urgent Indigenous American poetry and prose spanning the mid 20th Century to today.

In this important collection, award-winning author Louise Erdrich has selected poems from her two previous books of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, and has added nineteen new poems to compose Original Fire.
Louise Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.

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.
Natalie Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe.

In this innovative debut collection, Tacey M. Atsitty employs traditional, lyric, and experimental verse to create an intricate landscape she invites readers to explore. Presented in three sections, Tséyi', Gorge Dweller, and Tóhee,' the poems negotiate between belief and doubt, self and family, and interior and exterior landscapes.
Tacey M. Atsitty is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle People).

These poets are bound by a common attitude as well as a common heritage. All four--Joel Waters, Steve Pacheco, Luke Warm Water, and Trevino L. Brings Plenty--are Sioux, and all four identify themselves as "Skins" (as in "Redskins"). In their poems, they grapple with their heritage, wrestling with what it means to be a Sioux and a Skin today. It's a fight to the finish.

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to "cut a hole in the sky / to world inside." Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where "everyone is at least a little gay." This prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation.

Award-winning Nisga'a poet Jordan Abel's second collection of poetry, Un/inhabited , maps the terrain of the public domain to create a layered investigation of the interconnections between language and land.
Jordan Abel is a First Nation Nisga'a tribe descendant.

"In "Why Storms are named after People but Bullets remain nameless," we find Tanaya Winder in the thick of a beautiful burn, where "pain demands to be felt," where joy or maybe something more decolonial than it bubbles up from the black hole of the past. Winder aims a sociological eye at the gun, the bullet, and the throttle so that we might together constellate differently. "like any good indian woman" is one of my favourite poems to date!” –Billy-Ray Belcourt
Tanaya Winder is an enrolled member of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe.