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Living nations, living words : an anthology of first peoples poetry /

Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2021]Edition: First editionDescription: 221 pages : illustrations ; 21 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780393867916
  • 0393867919
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 811.008/0897 23
LOC classification:
  • PS591.I55 L56 2021
Summary: "A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. With work from Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, Layli Long Soldier, among others, Living Nations, Living Words showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, "poetry [that] emerges from the soul of a community, the heart and lands of the people. In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than 500 living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.""--
List(s) this item appears in: Native American Heritage Month Book List
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Holdings
Item type Current library Home library Collection Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Standard Loan Coeur d'Alene Library Adult Nonfiction Coeur d'Alene Library Book 811.008 HARJO (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 50610022935535
Standard Loan Hayden Library Adult Nonfiction Hayden Library Book 811/HARJO (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Checked out 05/20/2024 50610022974195
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.

This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project--including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others--to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, "that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship." In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.

Includes index.

"A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. With work from Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, Layli Long Soldier, among others, Living Nations, Living Words showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, "poetry [that] emerges from the soul of a community, the heart and lands of the people. In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than 500 living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.""--

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

  • Foreword (p. xi)
  • Introduction (p. xiii)
  • Becoming/East
  • Daybreak (p. 3)
  • B 'o E-a:g mas 'ab Him g Ju:ki/It is Going to Rain (p. 6)
  • Maoli (p. 9)
  • Heritage, X (p. 11)
  • Off-Island CHamorus (p. 14)
  • Welcoming Home Living Beings (p. 17)
  • Wichihaka/The One I Live With (p. 21)
  • Indigenous Physics: The Element Colonizatium (p. 24)
  • Coquille (p. 31)
  • Baby Out of Cut-Open Woman (p. 34)
  • Notes from Coosa (p. 37)
  • 1918 Union Valley Road Oklahoma (p. 39)
  • The Rhetorical Feminine (p. 47)
  • Current, I (p. 50)
  • These Rivers Remember (p. 62)
  • Anchorage, 1989 (p. 65)
  • Exile of Memory (p. 71)
  • Center/North-South
  • River People-The Lost Watch (p. 81)
  • Old Humptulips (p. 88)
  • Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Indian (p. 90)
  • I gotta be Indian tomorrow (p. 95)
  • This Island on which I Love You (p. 98)
  • Tiimiaq, something carried, (p. 102)
  • Palominos Near Tuba City (p. 106)
  • Advice to Myself (p. 108)
  • Peacemaking (p. 111)
  • Thought (p. 115)
  • Hell's Acre (p. 117)
  • Rookeries (p. 124)
  • The Book of the Missing, Murdered and Indigenous-Chapter 1 (p. 127)
  • Like any good indian woman (p. 130)
  • Poem on Disappearance (p. 133)
  • Na Wai Ea, The Freed Waters (p. 136)
  • Departure/West
  • This River (p. 157)
  • Trudell (p. 159)
  • Transplant: After Georgia O'Keeffe's Pelvis IV, 1944 (p. 162)
  • Resilience (p. 165)
  • In the Field (p. 168)
  • Shapeshifters Banned, Censored, or Otherwise Shit-Listed, aka Chosen Family Poem (p. 175)
  • Antiquing with Indians (p. 178)
  • Angry Red Planet (p. 181)
  • From Dissolve (p. 186)
  • What did you learn here? (Old Man House, Suquamish) (p. 190)
  • Within Dinétah the People's Spirit Remains Strong (p. 193)
  • Resolution 2 (p. 200)
  • Ilííngo Naalyéhé: Goods of Value (p. 203)
  • Postcolonial Love Poem (p. 208)
  • Acknowledgments (p. 211)
  • Credits (p. 213)
  • Index (p. 219)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Booklist Review

This richly individualized anthology takes its title from an interactive online map of current Native poets, a project undertaken by Harjo during her tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate. Sponsored by the Library of Congress, the map enables visitors to explore historical contexts in multimedia offerings, including recordings of recitations and commentary by the contributors, who each chose a poem "based on the theme of place and displacement, and with four touchpoints in mind: visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment." Poets also decided where to place themselves on the map, and this literary agency as well as the large portraits and brief bios that introduce each writer humanize the collection. Several established Native writers are included, such as Sherwin Bitsui, Jennifer Elise Foerster, and Craig Santos Perez, but the anthology dedicates ample space to emerging authors. And while another recent anthology edited by Harjo and others, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (2020), also organizes poems by geography, this title approaches place metaphorically, collecting poets and poems around shared themes. "East" includes pieces on daybreak and beginning,"Center" functions as "the belly and the heart of presence," and "West" signals departure and looks to the future.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Poet Laureate Harjo's historically important project for American poetry belongs in every collection.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently An American Sunrise, and a memoir. Crazy Brave. Named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019, she lives in Tulsa. Oklahoma, where she is a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

Patron comment on 12/03/2021

Joy Harjo's signature piece as the 23rd US Poet Laureate brings together the works of a diverse group of poets, all Indigenous Americans, but with unique voices and each their own story to tell. While the books stands fine on its own, I feel it is best appreciated as a companion to her online project of the same name. As a relative newcomer to poetry I often find it difficult to parse out the cadence an author is aiming for, especially if the layout of the poem is other than standard. Additionally, many of the poems contain words in a given poet's native language, which can be a struggle if you aren't familiar with the pronunciation. Listening to the author read their work while following along in the book removed those stumbling blocks and made for a beautifully immersive experience.

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