Effigies An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim, 2009
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke descends from moundbuilders and is of Cherokee, Creek, Huron, Metis, French Canadian, Lorraine, Portuguese, Irish, English, and Scot ascendants. Raised in North Carolina, the Plains and Canada, she previously worked horses, fields, waters, and factories. A fellow of the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, Black Earth Institute (emeritus), Salon Ada, and The Center for Great Plains Institute. dg nanouk okpik is an Alaskan Native, Inupiat — Inuit from Anchorage, Alaska. She is a Cook Inlet Region, Inc. shareholder as an enrolled member of federally recognized Tribe. Her family resides in Barrow, Alaska. She has served as secretary on both the American Indian Higher Education Consortium Student Congress and the Student Senate at Salish Kootenai College. dg nanouk okpik is an MFA candidate of Stonecoast, USM. Cathy Tagnak Rexford is Inupiaq, French/German and English from Anchorage, Alaska. Most of Cathy's work is inspired by the unique view of the Indigenous peoples of Northern Alaska. She has worked extensively in Native education and language efforts as researcher, curriculum developer and graphic designer. Cathy has also worked on contemporary Native theater and film projects as an actor, producer and writer. Brandy Nalani McDougall is a poet of Hawaiian, Chinese and Scottish descent from the island of Maui. An award-winning poet, she has published in journals and anthologies throughout Hawai‘i, the continental U.S. and the Pacific. Her first collection will be released in 2008. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Mahealani Perez-Wendt (formerly Mahealani Kamauu) is of Spanish, Hawaiian, and Chinese ancestry. She attended Kalaheo Elementary, Royal Elementary and Central Intermediate Schools, graduating from Kamehameha School for Girls in 1965. She earned a BA in political science and graduate certificate in public administration from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. In 1993, she received the Cades Literary Award. Her first book, Uluhaimalama was published in 2008.It is a rare pleasure to unleash beauty upon the ever-tragic world, an exception to the plagued misfortune of greed, despair, and injury. Though elements of colonization do present certain challenges and malady to a natural world inhabited for tens of thousands of years by peoples steeped in ideologies, practical and philosophic systems, they do not overcome the lingual sensibilities and prowess of the poets representing the areas of the planet present in this text. Instead the poets overcome the intrusion.
From baleen row, razor clam edge, rabid willow ptarmigan plume, to white buds of plumeria, gardenia, lei, shaded grave of dried lauhala and graying niu, fertile Pacific essence swells these poems into hummock ice knolls, into layers and layers of white sea laps rolling, into mindfulness, consideration, climate care--belonging.
From ulu, to cane knife, where aurora’s green vein bleeds blue and tangles into indigo or green-robed mauna combs t? stalks, palms, kukui, and pines. From Barrow to Waihe’e, tethered and hammered through wild among dark branches and snared by voices, these poems harbor whale and seal oil burning to bring sustenance to a reader’s search for light and with them carry us into a seafaring world of rich embrace. Spectacular, immediate, these beaches and beeches along the shores provide a tactile relationship made immense in their stream-crafted images.
dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt are four exceptional emerging poets. Their Pacific Rim relationship invited opportunity to publish these four chapbooks in one collected volume. A significant statement as to the changing state of the world, this collection is a rich pleasure.
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Editor’s Note
- In the time of Okvik
- d g nanouk okpik
- Mask of Dance
- In the time of Okvik
- Foist
- Ninilchik
- Date: Post Glacial
- Little Brother and Serpent Sedna
- Sinnaktuq
- There and Here
- Cell Block
- The Pact with Sedna
- Utkiavik: a Place for Hunting Owls
- Oil is a People
- Corpse Whale
- Palpate Voices
- For-the-Spirits-Who-have-Rounded-the-Bend iivaqsaat
- Spirit World
- Black Ice
- Cathy Tagnak Rexford
- Luis Gonzalez Palma Never Took a Picture Here
- Baleen Scrimshaw as 16 mm Film
- Inuit Print
- Kinetoscope
- The Negative
- The Ecology of Subsistence
- When Ivory Changes Color from the Oils in Your Skin
- Pre-Gunpowder
- Here
- With a Westwind
- Uncle Foot
- Baleen Corset
- A Caribou Skin Mask
- Scripture According to Sila
- Migration
- Bridge Passage
- What is Not Silence
- A Wind Drives Over the Waters
- Black Ice
- Return to the Kula House
- Brandy Nalani McDougall
- Po
- Huaka’i
- Haloa Naka
- Haumea
- Kumuhonua
- The History of This Place
- The Petroglyphs at Olowalu
- Lei Niho Palaoa
- Emma, 1993
- On Finding My Father’s First Essay, San Joaquin Delta College, 1987
- How I Learned to Write My Name
- Ma’alaea Harbor, Father’s Day
- The Salt-Wind of Waihe’e
- The Dream Of Kaha’ula
- Turns of Light, the Story of Your Birth
- Dirty Laundry
- Koa and the Burning of the Kula House
- Easter
- Return to the Kula House
- Cane Spider
- Back When We Lived with Ghosts
- Kukui
- Waiting for the Sunrise at Haleakal?
- Red Hibiscus in the Rain
- Synaptic Collisions
- Ho’ailona
- Ka ‘Olelo
- Over and Over the Return, Mo’oku’auhau
- Papatuanuku
- Papahanaumoku
- Ma’healani Perez-Wendt
- Papahanaumoku
- Segmented
- Kalalani
- Bury Our Hearts at Wal-Mart, etc.
- Double Decker
- We Are Not the Crime We Are the Evidence
- Uprooting
- Calvary At ‘Anaeho’omalu
- Nancy Kwan
- Anna at a Crossroads
- Huluhulu Bag
- Kipahulu
- No Steal
- Maile Never Miss
- Oblong Moon
- Biographical Notes
Effigies juxtaposes the distinctive voices and visions of four emerging poets – dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt. In drawing from their Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian cultures and histories, the poems in this book are not an assemblage but a living force and create an intricate, haunting weave.
Inuit Print
by Cathy Tagnak Rexford
I drop frozen whale skin into
my sister’s fish tank; marbled oil
refracts glass-woven baskets on her dirt floor.
This is the melting point of her lips,
her rice-papered speech,
her sloping breast, her song.
I brush liquid cobalt
on the edges of her stark white eyelids:
she remembers the tones of old ice,
the way it evaporated in the ocean current.
She wore a brown canvas
fashioned of bleached sealskin
before the rains turned dust into paint.
When she says the word lightning,
the polished baleen-hair brush beneath
her reach seems to ignite.
Steel rods are her memory,
her handwriting, her recurring dream,
her interruption of light.
Slouching against sinewed fishing line,
she inhales; chokes on the small pebbles
of Ualaqpa; I know her halogen veined
storytelling rote here, fifty below zero.