Copper Yearning invests itself in a compassionate dual vision—bearing witness to the lush beauty of our intricately woven environments and to the historical and contemporary perils that threaten them. Kimberly Blaeser’s fourth collection of poetry deftly reflects her Indigenous perspective and a global awareness. Through vividly rendered images, the poems dwell among watery geographies, alive to each natural nuance, alive also to the uncanny. Set in fishing boats, in dreams, in prisons, in memory, or in far flung countries like Bahrain, the pieces sing of mythic truths and of the poignant everyday injustices. But, whether resisting threats to effigy mounds or inhabiting the otherness of river otter, ultimately they voice a universal longing for a place of balance, a way of being in the world—for the ineffable.

"To be both visionary and accurate, true to physics and metaphysics at the same time, is rare and puts the poet in some rarefied company. Black, like a few other younger poets, is willing to include all the traditional effects of the lyric poem in his work, but he has set them going in new and lively ways, with the confidence of virtuosity and a belief in the ancient pleasures of pattern and repetition."—Mark Jarman, American Poet Lush and daring, Malachi Black's poems in Storm Toward Morning press all points along the spectrum of human positions, from sickness, isolation, and insomniac disarray to serenity, wonder, and spiritual yearning. Pulsing at the intersections of "eye and I," body and mind, physical and metaphysical, Black brings distinctive voice, vision, and music to matters of universal mortal concern. Query on Typography What is the light inside the opening of every letter: white behind the angles is a language bright because a curvature of space inside a line is visible is script a sign of what it does or does not occupy scripture the covenant of eye and I with word or what the word defines which is source and which is shrine the light of body or the light behind? Malachi Black holds a BA in literature from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He currently teaches at the University of San Diego and lives in California.

Apprenticed to Justice is a collection of vividly rendered lyrical and narrative poems that trace the complex inheritances of Indigenous America, this âeoestrange map drawn of blood and history.âe It opens with intriguing glimpses of individualsâe"a mother âeoeborn of dawn / in a reckless moon of miscegenation,âe cousins âeoewho rotated authority / on marbles sex and skunk etiquette,âe women âeoeplanting dreams with dank names like rutabaga and kohlrabiâe âe"and it turns on the notion of legacy. From what dark turmoil of earth do we emerge? How and what do we inherit? To what mesh of tangled origins do we live apprenticed? These are the literal and the metaphorical questions Anishinaabe author Kimberly Blaeser asks in this, her third collection of poetry.Grounded in rich details of places from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to the arctic region of Kirkenes, Norway, the poems link the people and the landscapes through storytelling. Narratives range from the comedy of a missing outhouse floor to the longing for the return of an MIA. The storied landscapes of the poems, the âeoeRocky bottom allotted land(s) / twenty-eight slow horse miles / from the village store,âe also become intertwined with tribal history. And the remembered tribal accounts of scorched earth campaigns or the Trail of Tears in their turn become enmeshed with contemporary justice issues including Potlatchâe(tm)s relentless clear cutting of forest lands and the strange cannibalism inherent in Sr. Inez Hilgerâe(tm)s study of âeoeotherâe cultures like that at Blaeserâe(tm)s home, White Earth Reservation. Ultimately, attention to these justice issues invoke the lives of tribal elders whose figurative âeoefragile houses / pegged at the corners with only hopeâe somehow represent and teach survival. Finally, each movement in the book connects back to the act of writing, to the poems themselves as both remembrance and a kind of revolutionâe"âeoethese fingers / drumming on keys.âe

Absentee Indians and Other Poems evokes personal yet universal experiences of the places that Native Americans call home, their family and national histories, and the emotional forces that help forge Native American identities. These are poems of exile, loss, and the celebration of that which remains. Anchored in the physical landscape, Blaeser’s poetry finds the sacred in those ordinary actions that bind a community together. As Blaeser turns to the mysterious passage from sleeping to wakefulness, or from nature to spirit, she reveals not merely the movement from one age or place to another, but the movement from experience to vision.

This book should appeal particularly to women, as Whalley writes with straightforwardness and humor about life as a middle-aged, blue collar, divorced mother. This is a book of quiet celebration, not anger.

From exciting and entertaining accounts of courage and humor to heartwarming tales of healing and learning, each touching story in this book will inspire dog lovers to rejoice in the unique bond they share with their canine companions.

Modern poems conceived first in Anishinaabemowin and then in English. Margaret Noodin explains in the preface of her new poetry collection, What the Chickadee Knows(Gijigijigaaneshiinh Gikendaan), "Whether we hear giji-giji-gaane-shii-shii or chick-a-dee-dee-dee depends on how we have been taught to listen. Our world is shaped by the sounds around us and the filter we use to turn thoughts into words. The lines and images here were conceived first in Anishinaabemowin and then in English. They are an attempt to hear and describe the world according to an Anishinaabe paradigm." The book is concerned with nature, history, tradition, and relationships, and these poems illuminate the vital place of the author's tribe both in the past and within the contemporary world. What the Chickadee Knows is a gesture toward a future that includes Anishinaabemowin and other indigenous languages seeing growth and revitalization. This bilingual collection includes Anishinaabemowin and English, with the poems mirroring one another on facing pages. In the first part, "What We Notice" (E-Maaminonendamang), Noodin introduces a series of seasonal poems that invoke Anishinaabe science and philosophy. The second part, "History" (Gaa Ezhiwebag), offers nuanced contemporary views of Anishinaabe history. The poems build in urgency, from observations of the natural world and human connection to poems centered in powerful grief and remembrance for events spanning from the Sandy Lake Tragedy of 1850, which resulted in the deaths of more than four hundred Ojibwe people, to the Standing Rock water crisis of 2016, which resulted in the prosecution of Native protesters and, ultimately, the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline on sacred land. The intent of What the Chickadee Knowsis to create a record of the contemporary Anishinaabe worldview as it is situated between the traditions of the past and as it contributes to the innovation needed for survival into the future. Readers of poetry with an interest in world languages and indigenous voices will need this book.