The Nature of Native American Poetry


Book Description

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.




Nature Poem


Book Description

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.




Native American Songs and Poems


Book Description

Rich 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.




American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism


Book Description

Although much contemporary American Indian literature examines the relationship between humans and the land, most Native authors do not set their work in the "pristine wilderness" celebrated by mainstream nature writers. Instead, they focus on settings such as reservations, open-pit mines, and contested borderlands. Drawing on her own teaching experience among Native Americans and on lessons learned from such recent scenes of confrontation as Chiapas and Black Mesa, Joni Adamson explores why what counts as "nature" is often very different for multicultural writers and activist groups than it is for mainstream environmentalists. This powerful book is one of the first to examine the intersections between literature and the environment from the perspective of the oppressions of race, class, gender, and nature, and the first to review American Indian literature from the standpoint of environmental justice and ecocriticism. By examining such texts as Sherman Alexie's short stories and Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead, Adamson contends that these works, in addition to being literary, are examples of ecological criticism that expand Euro-American concepts of nature and place. Adamson shows that when we begin exploring the differences that shape diverse cultural and literary representations of nature, we discover the challenge they present to mainstream American culture, environmentalism, and literature. By comparing the work of Native authors such as Simon Ortiz with that of environmental writers such as Edward Abbey, she reveals opportunities for more multicultural conceptions of nature and the environment. More than a work of literary criticism, this is a book about the search to find ways to understand our cultural and historical differences and similarities in order to arrive at a better agreement of what the human role in nature is and should be. It exposes the blind spots in early ecocriticism and shows the possibilities for building common groundÑ a middle placeÑ where writers, scholars, teachers, and environmentalists might come together to work for social and environmental change.




Harper's Anthology of Twentieth Century Native American Poetry


Book Description

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




The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature


Book Description

An informative and wide-ranging overview of Native American literature from the 1770s to present day.




Durable Breath


Book Description

Contemporary Native American poetry.




Carriers of the Dream Wheel


Book Description

A collection of poems from sixteen Native American poets, reflecting the attitudes, values and memories of a shared cultrual heritage.




Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature


Book Description

Presents an encyclopedia of American Indian literature in an alphabetical format listing authors and their works.




Native American Writers


Book Description

Presents a collection of critical essays analyzing modern Native American writers including Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and more.