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Layli Long Soldier: Whereas and the Power of Poetic Protest
Introduction:
Layli Long Soldier's Whereas isn't just a book; it's a linguistic weapon, a meticulously crafted indictment of historical injustices inflicted upon Indigenous peoples. This isn't a casual read; it demands attention, reflection, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. This post delves deep into Long Soldier's powerful work, exploring its structure, themes, and enduring significance in contemporary Indigenous literature and the broader conversation surrounding colonialism and its lasting impacts. We'll examine how Whereas masterfully utilizes language to expose systemic inequalities and advocate for a more equitable future. Get ready for a powerful journey into the heart of poetic protest.
Understanding the Structure of Whereas
Long Soldier's Whereas isn't a traditional narrative. It's a collection of prose poems, each structured as a series of "whereas" clauses, mirroring the legalistic language often used to justify historical injustices against Native Americans. This deliberate choice of form is crucial to the poem's impact. By employing the language of legal documents—typically associated with power and authority—Long Soldier subverts its inherent authority and exposes its inherent hypocrisy. The poem doesn’t simply recount historical events; it meticulously deconstructs the language used to legitimize them, revealing the inherent bias and erasure embedded within official narratives.
The Power of Repetition and Accumulation
The repetitive structure of the "whereas" clauses isn't merely stylistic; it serves a vital purpose. The accumulation of injustices, each meticulously detailed, creates a cumulative effect, highlighting the overwhelming weight of historical trauma and ongoing oppression. The repetition underscores the systemic nature of the problem, demonstrating how individual acts of violence and dispossession become part of a larger pattern of oppression.
Challenging the Narrative of Progress
Long Soldier challenges the dominant narrative of American progress, revealing how this narrative often ignores or actively erases the suffering of Indigenous peoples. Whereas forces the reader to confront the uncomfortable realities of colonization and its ongoing impact, challenging simplistic notions of reconciliation and progress.
Key Themes in Whereas
Language as a Weapon:
The poem’s most striking feature is its masterful use of language. Long Soldier doesn't just tell a story; she dissects the language used to tell the story, exposing the ways in which language itself has been used to dispossess and dehumanize Indigenous peoples. This linguistic critique is central to the poem's power.
Historical Trauma and its Legacy:
Whereas grapples with the lasting effects of historical trauma on Indigenous communities. The poem doesn't shy away from the brutality and injustice inflicted upon Native Americans, presenting a stark and unflinching account of their experiences. It explores how this trauma continues to shape the present, impacting everything from cultural identity to economic disparities.
Sovereignty and Self-Determination:
Underlying the poem is a powerful assertion of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. By reclaiming the narrative and controlling the language used to describe their history, Long Soldier asserts the right of Indigenous peoples to define their own identity and future, free from the constraints of colonial narratives.
The Politics of Recognition:
Whereas is a poignant exploration of the politics of recognition. The poem interrogates the ways in which Indigenous peoples are represented—or rather, misrepresented—in mainstream culture and official narratives. It demands genuine recognition of Indigenous experiences and a willingness to confront the complexities of historical injustice.
The Enduring Significance of Whereas
Whereas is not simply a historical account; it’s a powerful call to action. It challenges readers to confront their own complicity in systems of oppression and to engage in a more critical and nuanced understanding of Indigenous history and contemporary realities. The poem's enduring significance lies in its ability to provoke dialogue, inspire critical thinking, and empower Indigenous voices in the ongoing struggle for justice and recognition. It’s a crucial text for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the complexities of colonialism and its lasting impact.
Conclusion:
Layli Long Soldier's Whereas is a masterpiece of poetic protest, a powerful indictment of historical injustice, and a vital contribution to contemporary Indigenous literature. Its innovative structure, evocative language, and unflinching examination of historical trauma make it a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the ongoing struggle for Indigenous rights and recognition. The poem’s lasting impact lies in its ability to challenge dominant narratives, provoke dialogue, and ultimately, inspire action towards a more equitable future.
FAQs:
1. What is the significance of the "whereas" clauses in Whereas? The repetitive use of "whereas" clauses mimics the legal language used to justify historical injustices, highlighting the hypocrisy and inherent bias within these legal frameworks.
2. How does Whereas address the issue of historical trauma? The poem directly confronts the brutal realities of historical trauma, demonstrating its lingering impact on Indigenous communities and challenging simplistic notions of reconciliation.
3. What is the role of language in Whereas? Language is central to the poem's power. Long Soldier dissects the language used to describe Indigenous history, exposing its inherent biases and reclaiming the narrative for Indigenous peoples.
4. Why is Whereas considered an important work of contemporary literature? Whereas is significant for its innovative structure, powerful message, and its ability to spark critical conversations about colonialism, Indigenous rights, and the politics of representation.
5. How does Whereas contribute to the ongoing conversation about Indigenous sovereignty? The poem powerfully asserts Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination by reclaiming the narrative and challenging dominant, often colonial, understandings of Indigenous history and identity.
| layli long soldier whereas: WHEREAS Layli Long Soldier, 2017-03-07 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. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Afterland Mai Der Vang, 2017-04-04 The 2016 winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Carolyn Forché When I make the crossing, you must not be taken no matter what the current gives. When we reach the camp, there will be thousands like us. If I make it onto the plane, you must follow me to the roads and waiting pastures of America. We will not ride the water today on the shoulders of buffalo as we used to many years ago, nor will we forage for the sweetest mangoes. I am refugee. You are too. Cry, but do not weep. —from “Transmigration” Afterland is a powerful, essential collection of poetry that recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. Mai Der Vang is telling the story of her own family, and by doing so, she also provides an essential history of the Hmong culture’s ongoing resilience in exile. Many of these poems are written in the voices of those fleeing unbearable violence after U.S. forces recruited Hmong fighters in Laos in the Secret War against communism, only to abandon them after that war went awry. That history is little known or understood, but the three hundred thousand Hmong now living in the United States are living proof of its aftermath. With poems of extraordinary force and grace, Afterland holds an original place in American poetry and lands with a sense of humanity saved, of outrage, of a deep tradition broken by war and ocean but still intact, remembered, and lived. |
| layli long soldier whereas: New Poets of Native Nations Heid E. Erdrich, 2018-07-10 A landmark anthology celebrating twenty-one Native poets first published in the twenty-first century New Poets of Native Nations gathers poets of diverse ages, styles, languages, and tribal affiliations to present the extraordinary range and power of new Native poetry. Heid E. Erdrich has selected twenty-one poets whose first books were published after the year 2000 to highlight the exciting works coming up after Joy Harjo and Sherman Alexie. Collected here are poems of great breadth—long narratives, political outcries, experimental works, and traditional lyrics—and the result is an essential anthology of some of the best poets writing now. Poets included are Tacey M. Atsitty, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Laura Da’, Natalie Diaz, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Eric Gansworth, Gordon Henry, Jr., Sy Hoahwah, LeAnne Howe, Layli Long Soldier, Janet McAdams, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Margaret Noodin, dg okpik, Craig Santos Perez, Tommy Pico, Cedar Sigo, M. L. Smoker, Gwen Westerman, and Karenne Wood. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Loop of Jade Sarah Howe, 2015-05-07 *WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2015* *WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES / PETERS FRASER + DUNLOP YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2015* There is a Chinese proverb that says: ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’ But geese, like daughters, know the obligation to return home. In her exquisite first collection, Sarah Howe explores a dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots. With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love – what meaning we find in the world, in art, and in each other. Crossing the bounds of time, race and language, this is an enthralling exploration of self and place, of migration and inheritance, and introduces an unmistakable new voice in British poetry. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Lake Superior Lorine Niedecker, 2013-04-02 A reader-friendly anthology of influence—the geologic, historical, and personal history to supplement Lorine Niedecker’s poem. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Poetry Unbound Pádraig Ó Tuama, 2022-10-06 This inspiring collection, curated by the host of the Poetry Unbound, presents fifty poems about what it means to be alive in the world today. Each poem is paired with Pádraig’s illuminating commentary that offers personal anecdotes and generous insights into the content of the poem. Engaging, accessible and inviting, Poetry Unbound is the perfect companion for everyone who loves poetry and for anyone who wants to go deeper into poetry but doesn’t necessarily know how to do so. Contributors include Hanif Abdurraqib, Patience Agbabi, Raymond Antrobus, Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, Kei Miller, Roger Robinson, Lemn Sissay, Layli Long Soldier and more. |
| layli long soldier whereas: How To Wash A Heart Bhanu Kapil, 2020-03-26 Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020. Poetry Book Society Choice, Summer 2020. Bhanu Kapil’s extraordinary and original work has been published in the US over the last two decades. During that time Kapil has established herself as one of our most important and ethical writers. Her books often defy categorisation as she fearlessly engages with colonialism and its ongoing and devastating aftermath, creating what she calls in Ban en Banlieue (2015) a ‘Literature that is not made from literature’. Always at the centre of her books and performances are the experiences of the body, and, whether she is exploring racism, violence, the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England or America, what emerges is a heart-stopping, life-affirming way of telling the near impossible-to-be-told. How To Wash A Heart, Kapil's first full-length collection published in the UK, depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Drawn from a first performance at the ICA in London in 2019, and using poetry as a mode of interrogation that is both rigorous, compassionate, surreal, comic, painful and tender, by turn, Kapil begins to ask difficult and urgent questions about the limits of inclusion, hospitality and care. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Lakota America Pekka Hamalainen, 2019-10-22 The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history Named One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 - Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine - Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction Turned many of the stories I thought I knew about our nation inside out.--Cornelia Channing, Paris Review, Favorite Books of 2019 My favorite non-fiction book of this year.--Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opinion A briliant, bold, gripping history.--Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019 All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness--Parul Sehgal, New York Times This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then--in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion--as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Cinder Susan Stewart, 2017-02-07 “One of the finest poets of the last fifty years.” —Salt to the Nth, like the truth of an ending unskeined across the crust of the white field. Though it happened only once, I am sending the thought of the thought continuing. To return to the field before the mowing. When a goldfinch swayed on a blue stem stalk, and the wind and the sun stirred the hay. —from “After the Mowing” Cinder: New and Selected Poems gathers for the first time poetry from across Susan Stewart’s thirty-five-year career, including many extraordinary new poems. From brief songs to longer meditative sequences, and always with formal innovation and exquisite precision, Stewart evokes the innocence of childhood, the endangered mysteries of the natural world, and deeply felt perceptions, both acute and shared. “Stewart explores our insatiable desire to remember and make meaning out of this remembering,” Ange Mlinko writes in The Nation. “Stewart’s elegiac bent has broadened, over time, from the personal lyric . . . to what might be called the cultural lyric. Fewer and fewer of her poems reference what she alone remembers; they are about what you and I remember.” Reading across this retrospective collection is a singular experience of seeing the unfolding development of one of the most ingenious and moving lyric writers in contemporary poetry. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Borderland Apocrypha Anthony Cody, 2020 Borderland Apocrypha is centered around the collective histories of Mexican lynchings following the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and the subsequent erasures, traumas, and state-sanctioned violences committed towards communities of color in the present day. Cody's debut collection responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories via an experimental poetic that invents and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book's axis in a resistance, a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. Part autohistoria, part docupoetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha exhumes the past in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and future- building-- |
| layli long soldier whereas: The More Extravagant Feast Leah Naomi Green, 2020-04-07 * One of the Boston Globe's Best Books of 2020 * Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Li-Young Lee The More Extravagant Feast focuses on the trophic exchanges of a human body with the world via pregnancy, motherhood, and interconnection—the acts of making and sustaining other bodies from one’s own, and one’s own from the larger world. Leah Naomi Green writes from attentiveness to the vast availability and capacity of the weedy, fecund earth and from her own human place within more-than-human life, death, and birth. Lyrically and spiritually rich, striving toward honesty and understanding, The More Extravagant Feast is an extraordinary book of awareness of our dependency on ecological systems—seen and unseen. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Walking on Cowrie Shells Nana Nkweti, 2021-06-01 A “boisterous and high-spirited debut” (Kirkus starred review)“that enthralls the reader through their every twist and turn” (Publishers Weekly starred review), named one of the Most Anticipated Books for Brittle Paper, The Millions, and The Rumpus, penned by a finalist for the AKO Caine PrizeIn her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti's virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story “It Takes a Village, Some Say,” Nkweti skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. In “The Devil Is a Liar,” a pregnant pastor's wife struggles with the collision of western Christianity and her mother's traditional Cameroonian belief system as she worries about her unborn child.In other stories, Nkweti vaults past realism, upending genre expectations in a satirical romp about a jaded PR professional trying to spin a zombie outbreak in West Africa, and in a mermaid tale about a Mami Wata who forgoes her power by remaining faithful to a fisherman she loves. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Nature Poem Tommy Pico, 2017-05-09 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. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Nine Continents Xiaolu Guo, 2017-10-10 The acclaimed novelist’s award-winning memoir of growing up in a remote Chinese fishing village is “a rich and insightful coming-of-age story” (Kirkus). The acclaimed author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and I Am China, Xiaolu Guo grew up an unwanted child in a poor fishing village on the East China Sea. But a Taoist monk made a startling prediction to her grandmother: that Guo would prove herself to be a peasant warrior and grow up to travel the nine continents. In Nine Continents, Guo tells the story of a curious mind coming of age in an inhospitable country, and her determination to seek a life beyond the limits of its borders. From her family’s village to a rapidly changing Beijing, to a life beyond China, Nine Continents presents a fascinating portrait of how the Cultural Revolution shaped families, and how the country’s economic ambitions have given rise to great change. This “moving and often exhilarating” memoir confirms Xiaolu Guo as one of world literature’s most urgent voices (Financial Times, UK). |
| layli long soldier whereas: The Language of Blood Jane Jeong Trenka, 2003 An adoptee's search for identity takes her on a journey from Minnesota to Korea and back as she seeks to resolve the dualities that have long defined her life: Korean-born, American-raised, never fully belonging to either. For years, Korean adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka tried to be the ideal daughter. She was always polite, earned perfect grades, and excelled as a concert pianist. She went to church with her American family in small-town Minnesota and learned not to ask about the mother who had given her away. Then, while she was far from home on a music scholarship, living in a big city for the first time, one of her fellow university students began to follow her, his obsession ultimately escalating into a plot for her murder. In radiant prose that ranges seamlessly from pure lyricism to harrowing realism, Trenka recounts repeated close encounters with her stalker and the years of repressed questions that her ordeal awakened. Determined not to be defined by her stalker's twisted assessment of her worth, she struck out in search of her own identity - free of western stereotypes of geishas and good girls. Doing so, however, meant confronting her American family and fighting the bureaucracy at the agency that had arranged for her adoption. Jane Jeong Trenka dares to ask fundamental questions about the nature of family and identity. Are we who we decide to be, or who other people would make us? What is this bond more powerful than words, this unspoken language of blood? To find out, Trenka must reacquaint herself with her mother and sisters in Seoul and devise a way to blend two distinct cultures into one she seared into the memory by indelible images and unforgettable prose. This is a poetic tour-de-force by an essential new voice in Asian American literature. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Follow the Blackbirds Gwen Nell Westerman, 2013-08-01 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. In this moving collection, Westerman reflects on history and family from a unique perspective, one that connects the painful past and the hard-fought future of her Dakota homeland. Grounded in vivid story and memory, Westerman draws on both English and the Dakota language to celebrate the long journey along sunflower-lined highways of the tallgrass prairies of the Great Plains that returns her to a place filled with “more than history.” An intense homage to the power of place, this book tells a masterful story of cultural survival and the power of language. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Geographies of Identity Jill Darling, 2021-11-04 Geographies of Identity: Narrative Forms, Feminist Futures explores identity and American culture through hybrid, prose work by women, and expands the strategies of cultural poetics practices into the study of innovative narrative writing. Informed by Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Harryette Mullen, Julia Kristeva, and others, this project further considers feminist identity politics, race, and ethnicity as cultural content in and through poetic and non/narrative forms. The texts reflected on here explore literal and figurative landscapes, linguistic and cultural geographies, sexual borders, and spatial topographies. Ultimately, they offer non-prescriptive models that go beyond expectations for narrative forms, and create textual webs that reflect the diverse realities of multi-ethnic, multi-oriented, multi-linguistic cultural experiences. Readings of Gertrude Stein's A Geographical History of America, Renee Gladman's Juice, Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Juliana Spahr's The Transformation, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS show how alternatively narrative modes of writing can expand access to representation, means of identification, and subjective agency, and point to horizons of possibility for new futures. These texts critique essentializing practices in which subjects are defined by specific identity categories, and offer complicated, contextualized, and historical understandings of identity formation through the textual weaving of form and content. |
| layli long soldier whereas: If You Want to Write Brenda Ueland, 2013-05-20 Brenda Ueland was a journalist, editor, freelance writer, and teacher of writing. In If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit she shares her philosophies on writing and life in general. Ueland firmly believed that anyone can write, that everyone is talented, original, and has something important to say. In this book she explains how find that spark that will make you a great writer. Carl Sandburg called this book the best book ever written about how to write. Join the millions of others who've found inspiration and unlocked their own talent. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Sho Douglas Kearney, 2022-01-18 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney’s Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl Diane Seuss, 2018-05-01 Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Diane Seuss’s brilliant follow-up to Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Still life with stack of bills phone cord cig butt and freezer-burned Dreamsicle Still life with Easter Bunny twenty caged minks and rusty meat grinder Still life with whiskey wooden leg two potpies and a dead parakeet Still life with pork rinds pickled peppers and the Book of Revelation Still life with feeding tube oxygen half-eaten raspberry Zinger Still life with convenience store pecking order shotgun blast to the face —from “American Still Lives” Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt’s painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer’s own troubled gaze. In Diane Seuss’s new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt’s painting is presented across the book in pieces—details that hide more than they reveal until they’re assembled into a whole. With invention and irreverence, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Instead, Seuss invites in the alienated, the washed-up, the ugly, and the freakish—the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O’Keeffe, and Rothko. Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that “our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting.” |
| layli long soldier whereas: American Indian Stories Zitkala-Sa, 2022-05-28 American Indian Stories is a collection of stories by Zitkála-Šá. The author was a Sioux historian and recounts here several colorful legends and tales from American Indian oral tradition. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Deluge Leila Chatti, 2020-04-21 “To write a series of poems out of extreme illness is a bracing accomplishment indeed. In Deluge... Leila Chatti, born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, brilliantly explores the trauma. —Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as flooding. In the Qur’an, as in the Bible, the Flood was sent as punishment. The idea of disease as punishment drives this collection’s themes of shame, illness, grief, and gender, transmuting religious narratives through the lens of a young Arab-American woman suffering a taboo female affliction. Deluge investigates the childhood roots of faith and desire alongside their present day enactments. Chatti’s remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Delight in Disorder , 2011 |
| layli long soldier whereas: Scribe Alyson Hagy, 2018-10-02 A haunting, evocative tale about the power of storytelling A brutal civil war has ravaged the country, and contagious fevers have decimated the population. Abandoned farmhouses litter the isolated mountain valleys and shady hollows. The economy has been reduced to barter and trade. In this craggy, unwelcoming world, the central character of Scribe ekes out a lonely living on the family farmstead where she was raised and where her sister met an untimely end. She lets a migrant group known as the Uninvited set up temporary camps on her land, and maintains an uneasy peace with her cagey neighbors and the local enforcer. She has learned how to make paper and ink, and she has become known for her letter-writing skills, which she exchanges for tobacco, firewood, and other scarce resources. An unusual request for a letter from a man with hidden motivations unleashes the ghosts of her troubled past and sets off a series of increasingly calamitous events that culminate in a harrowing journey to a crossroads. Drawing on traditional folktales and the history and culture of Appalachia, Alyson Hagy has crafted a gripping, swiftly plotted novel that touches on pressing issues of our time—migration, pandemic disease, the rise of authoritarianism—and makes a compelling case for the power of stories to both show us the world and transform it. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Look at This Blue Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, 2022-03-29 Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Poetry! Interweaving elegy, indictment, and hope into a love letter to California, Look at This Blue examines America’s genocidal past and present to warn of a future threatened by mass extinction and climate peril. Truths about what we have lost and have yet to lose permeate this book-length poem by American Book Award winner and Fulbright scholar Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. An assemblage of historical record and lyric fragments, these poems form a taxonomy of threatened lives—human, plant, and animal—in a century marked by climate emergency. Look at This Blue insists upon a reckoning with and redress of America’s continuing violence toward Earth and its peoples, as Hedge Coke’s cataloguing of loss crescendos into resistance. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Good Talk Mira Jacob, 2019-03-26 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “beautiful and eye-opening” (Jacqueline Woodson), “hilarious and heart-rending” (Celeste Ng) graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing. ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, BuzzFeed, Esquire, Literary Journal, Kirkus Reviews “How brown is too brown?” “Can Indians be racist?” “What does real love between really different people look like?” Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob’s half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she’s gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love. Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation—and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD “Jacob’s earnest recollections are often heartbreaking, but also infused with levity and humor. What stands out most is the fierce compassion with which she parses the complexities of family and love.”—Time “Good Talk uses a masterful mix of pictures and words to speak on life’s most uncomfortable conversations.”—io9 “Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book-as-art-object into the garbage. Her new book changes everything.”—Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy |
| layli long soldier whereas: Sleeping with the Dictionary Harryette Mullen, 2002-02-22 Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation--which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky--also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse. Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being licked all over by the English tongue, and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a pillow dictionary. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Come and See. [A religious tract.] , 1844 |
| layli long soldier whereas: Darkroom Lila Quintero Weaver, 2012-03 The author tells her story of being a Latina in the Jim Crow South. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Stereo(TYPE) Jonah Mixon-Webster, 2021-07-13 A radical, urgent collection of poems about Blackness, the self, and the dismantling of corrupt powers in the fight for freedom. A PEN America Literary Award Winner Jonah Mixon-Webster works at the intersections of space and the body, race and region, sexuality and class. Stereo(TYPE), his debut collection of poetry, is a reckoning and a force, a revision of our most sacred mythologies, and a work of documentary reporting from Mixon-Webster’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, where clean tap water remains an uncertainty and the aftermath of racist policies persist. Challenging stereotypes through scenes that scatter with satire, violence, and the extreme vagaries of everyday life, Mixon-Webster invents visual/sonic forms, conceptualizes poems as transcripts and frequently asked questions, and dives into dreamscapes and modern tragedies, deconstructing the very foundations America is built on. Interrogating language and the ways we wield it as both sword and shield, Stereo(TYPE) is a one-of-a-kind, rapturous collection of vital and beautiful poems. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Registers of Illuminated Villages Tarfia Faizullah, 2018-03-06 “Tarfia Faizullah is a poet of brave and unflinching vision.” —Natasha Trethewey Somebody is always singing. Songs were not allowed. Mother said, Dance and the bells will sing with you. I slithered. Glass beneath my feet. I locked the door. I did not die. I shaved my head. Until the horns I knew were there were visible. Until the doorknob went silent. —from “100 Bells” Registers of Illuminated Villages is Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut, Seam. Faizullah’s new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices—elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages,” suggests illuminated texts, one a Qur’an in which the speaker’s name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq. Faizullah is an essential new poet whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, and—even in its unsparing brutality—full of love. |
| layli long soldier whereas: A Treatise on Stars Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, 2020-02-25 An ethereal new collection that is “visceral with intellection” (David Lau) Winner of the Bollingen Prize Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.” |
| layli long soldier whereas: The Empathy Exams Leslie Jamison, 2014-04-01 From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014 Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain—real and imagined, her own and others'—Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace. |
| layli long soldier whereas: The Making of a Poem Eavan Boland, Mark Strand, 2001 Provides a detailed explanation of the different forms of poetry--sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina--and explains the origin, traces their history, and provides examples for each form. |
| layli long soldier whereas: The Art of the Poetic Line James Longenbach, 2008 Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. James Longenbach opens The Art of the Poetic Line with that essential statement. Through a range of examples - from Shakespeare and Milton to Ashbery and Glück - Longenbach describes the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. That function is sonic, he argues, and our true experience of it can only be identified in relation to other elements in a poem. Syntax and the interaction of different kinds of line endings are primary to understanding line, as is the relationship of lineated poems to prose poetry. The Art of the Poetic Line is a vital new resource by one of America's most important critics and one of poetry's most engaging practitioners. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Full Moon Boat Fred Marchant, 2000-09 In 1970, during the war in Viet Nam, Marchant became one of the first Marine officers ever to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector. In the poems contained in Full Moon Boat, Marchant explores the concept of violence: What are its origins and consequences? What actions of the heart and mind resist it? Marchant takes us on a voyage from childhood to adult trauma, and eventually to a peace arrived at by unflinching meditation. A hard-won peace, it is our undiscovered country. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Window Left Open Jennifer Grotz, 2016-02-02 The supreme art of Window left open is that of close attention to the world the poet passes through--Page [4] of cover. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Ghost of Diana Khoi Nguyen, 2018 Winner of the Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Prize |
| layli long soldier whereas: Half-Hazard Kristen Tracy, 2018-11-06 Half-Hazard is the Winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation for a debut by an American poet over forty. Half-Hazard is a book of near misses, would-be tragedies, and luck. As Kristen Tracy writes in the title poem, “Dangers here. Perils there. It’ll go how it goes.” The collection follows her wide curiosity, from growing up in a small Mormon farming community to her exodus into the forbidden world, where she finds snakes, car accidents, adulterers, meteors, and death-marked mice. These wry, observant narratives are accompanied by a ringing lyricism, and Tracy’s knack for noticing what’s so funny about trouble and her natural impulse to want to put all the broken things back together. Full of wrong turns, false loves, quashed beliefs, and a menagerie of animals, Half-Hazard introduces a vibrant new voice in American poetry, one of resilience, faith, and joy. |
| layli long soldier whereas: Hard Child Natalie Shapero, 2017 Natalie Shapero spars with apathy, nihilism, and mortality, while engaging the rich territory of the 30s and new motherhood |
WHEREAS | The Poetry Foundation
WHEREAS. By Layli Long Soldier. WHEREAS a string-bean blue-eyed man leans back into a swig of beer work-weary lips at the dark bottle keeping cool in short sleeves and khakis he …
Layli Long Soldier | Whereas, Poems, Books, & Facts | Britannica
Nov 10, 2024 · Layli Long Soldier is an American poet best known for her award-winning debut poetry collection, Whereas (2017), which addresses past and present injustices against Native …
Whereas - Harvard Review
Jul 18, 2017 · Long Soldier, an Oglala Lakota poet and 2016 Whiting awardee, offers a personal and reactionary take on indigenous American life in response to failed promises, obfuscatory …
Whereas : Long Soldier, Layli : Free Download, Borrow, and …
Jan 12, 2023 · Whereas. by. Long Soldier, Layli. Publication date. 2017. Topics. Indian women -- Poetry, Oglala Indians -- Poetry, American poetry -- 21st century. Publisher. Minneapolis, …
Amazon.com: WHEREAS: Poems: 9781555977672: Soldier, Layli Long…
Mar 7, 2017 · 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 …
WHEREAS - Academy of American Poets
The first and larger half of Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS is made up of seventeen individual poems, the second is one long poem titled “Whereas,” which responds to President Obama’s …
WHEREAS - Graywolf Press
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 …
Whereas (book) - Wikipedia
Whereas is a 2017 collection of poetry written by Oglala Lakota author, Layli Long Soldier. The collection was written as a direct response to S.J. Res 14, [1] a congressional apology and …
WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier - Poetry.com
May 23, 2022 · Read, review and discuss the WHEREAS poem by Layli Long Soldier on Poetry.com.
A Native American Poet Excavates the Language of Occupation
Aug 4, 2017 · The American poet Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection, “Whereas,” is in part a response to the Congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans, which President …
WHEREAS | The Poetry Foundation
WHEREAS. By Layli Long Soldier. WHEREAS a string-bean blue-eyed man leans back into a swig of beer work-weary lips at the dark bottle keeping cool in short sleeves and khakis he …
Layli Long Soldier | Whereas, Poems, Books, & Facts | Britannica
Nov 10, 2024 · Layli Long Soldier is an American poet best known for her award-winning debut poetry collection, Whereas (2017), which addresses past and present injustices against Native …
Whereas - Harvard Review
Jul 18, 2017 · Long Soldier, an Oglala Lakota poet and 2016 Whiting awardee, offers a personal and reactionary take on indigenous American life in response to failed promises, obfuscatory …
Whereas : Long Soldier, Layli : Free Download, Borrow, and …
Jan 12, 2023 · Whereas. by. Long Soldier, Layli. Publication date. 2017. Topics. Indian women -- Poetry, Oglala Indians -- Poetry, American poetry -- 21st century. Publisher. Minneapolis, …
Amazon.com: WHEREAS: Poems: 9781555977672: Soldier, Layli Long…
Mar 7, 2017 · 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 …
WHEREAS - Academy of American Poets
The first and larger half of Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS is made up of seventeen individual poems, the second is one long poem titled “Whereas,” which responds to President Obama’s …
WHEREAS - Graywolf Press
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 …
Whereas (book) - Wikipedia
Whereas is a 2017 collection of poetry written by Oglala Lakota author, Layli Long Soldier. The collection was written as a direct response to S.J. Res 14, [1] a congressional apology and …
WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier - Poetry.com
May 23, 2022 · Read, review and discuss the WHEREAS poem by Layli Long Soldier on Poetry.com.
A Native American Poet Excavates the Language of Occupation
Aug 4, 2017 · The American poet Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection, “Whereas,” is in part a response to the Congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans, which President …
