Essays introduce and critique the works of eight modern and upcoming Native American poets, and study how Native Americans have been influenced and have in turn influenced British and American literature.

A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet. A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview, and more. Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.

Translated by leading scholars and poets, these ancient and modern songs span tribal traditions — Iroquois, Cherokee, Navajo, Eskimo, and more — offering authentic insights into personal and ceremonial life.

DIVRich selection of traditional songs and contemporary verse by Seminole, Hopi, Arapaho, Nootka, other Indian writers and poets. Nature, tradition, Indians' role in contemporary society, other topics. /div

Representing the work of thirty-one poets since the turn of the century, this is the definitive anthology of Native American poetry.

Whitman and Neruda wrote from an Americanist perspective. Both developed an oral, tribal poetics and assumed shamanic voices and personae in their major works, Leaves of Grass and Canto General.