Poems both punishing and radiant. No one is writing like Minnis, and no one should dare.

A playful collection of poems reconfiguring iconic dialogue from classic American films to upend notions of love, wealth, gender, and consumption.

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.

Chelsey Minnis's formal invention and wild personae represent a progressive yet individualized position in the galaxy of truly contemporary poetry. Zirconia's female speaker is by turns fatigued, charmed, wishful, battered, sly, perverse, and omnipotent. These poems engage a material world not unlike ours yet featuring a phantasmagorically elliptical relationship to the dimension of real action. Her speaker is detached, but alive to the poignancy of detachment, and through the "silver lips of a feverish child" invites connectivity by means of tenderness and brutality. Long pauses, enforced by strings of gemlike punctuation, allow for the reader's digestion of hilarious, frightened, sometimes frightening substance. One is compelled to follow trails of feminine intuition, savagery, ennui, fantasy, and intimacy to their diabolical, fruitful conclusions. Zirconia is accessible, confrontational, hilarious, occasionally shocking, never ever dull, and often extremely moving.

"Juvenile mockery of poetry and the American poetry establishment, as well as excited reverence for both, are the themes of [Chelsey] Minnis's second collection."--Publishers Weekly "Decadent! Childish! . . . indulgent and melancholy . . . moments of extreme morbidity and anger."--Arielle Greenberg "Her poems take some getting used to."--Robert Strong "Many won't find her . . . acceptable at all...--Cole Swensen