Indianische Lyrik

With calm elegance and precise language, Rivers in My Veins is a work of lyric courage celebrating the connection we all share to the earth. Kara Briggs' poems sing her people, Sauk-Suiattle and Yakama, onto the pages. "Land we live on land," she writes, calling us to embrace our kinship with the earth. As a career journalist, Briggs uses documentary poetry to expose the false settler-colonial narratives while innovating rhythms from the social dances of her tribes in poems that take the reader to the dance circle. She received the 2024 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry for "Acknowledgement Two," a poem in this collection about her uncle who fought for fishing rights. Her fierce love of lands, waters, and stories of her peoples are carried in familiar poetic forms-sonnet, pantoum, and haiku-as vehicles to carry the readers on a journey through our shared world of literary - and deeply alive - landscapes.In groundbreaking forms of her ancestors and for future generations, Briggs introduces profiles of a Yakama treaty fisherman, a great-great-grandmother basket maker, and a Sauk-Suiattle leader calling for accountability, sharing the humanity and modernity of Native peoples. She uses sonnets, pantoums, and haiku as familiar vehicles for readers as she carries them into unfamiliar history and perspectives. She questions our relationship with words about Indigenous peoples by exploring their etymologies. She engages literary ancestors, poets Carolyn Kizer and Janice Gould, re-examining their poetics in her own. Kara Briggs works on environmental issues with tribes on the West Coast and has a background in journalism and higher education. She is a former president of the Native American Journalists Association. She graduated in 2024 with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. This is her first poetry collection and her first publication with St. Julian Press.

Discover the Timeless Echoes of Ancient Nahuatl PoetryStep into the mesmerizing world of Ancient Nahuatl Poetry, a captivating collection that unveils the soul-stirring verses of the Aztec civilization. Curated by the esteemed Daniel G. Brinton, this anthology presents the Nahuatl text of twenty-seven ancient Mexican poems, offering a rare glimpse into the rich cultural legacy of pre-Columbian America.For decades, this literary gem has been out of print, but now, thanks to Alpha Editions, it has been lovingly republished for the current and future generations. This is not just a book; it's a collector's edition that bridges the past and present, inviting readers to explore the profound wisdom and lyrical beauty of a bygone era.Whether you're a history enthusiast, a poetry lover, or a curious soul eager to delve into the depths of indigenous literature, Ancient Nahuatl Poetry promises to be an enlightening journey. Let the voices of the ancients guide you through their tales of love, nature, and spirituality, and enrich your understanding of a world long past but never forgotten.Embrace this unique opportunity to own a piece of literary history and let the ancient Nahuatl poets speak to you across the ages.

Creator, Numu Naa'a, is the greatest artist. Creator created us to love His/Her creations through our creations. Everyone is an artist. Artists inspire other artists. In art, there's no thinking in black and white. Instead, there are many colors that can all be mixed and blended together. May this book paint layers of meaning in readers' minds and provide some food for thought.This book presents a mixture of ideas from various cultural traditions that shape the author's experiences, from her roots in Tamil Nadu, India, to Buddhist stories and practices, and Native American languages. Ultimately, she draws from the spirit of unity of all peoples and concepts on Mother Earth to reflect back to the world universally relatable themes, regardless of one's cultural background and upbringing.

PREFACEThe influence of American Indian song-literature has touched both the music and the literature of contemporary America. Those writers who use Indian themes are legion. Mary Austin has gone farthest, perhaps, among the writers of the day in relating her poetic work to the native rhythms of America.<BR>These native rhythms pulsed through the songs of our Red Men for centuries before our Christian era. The very beautiful Aztec and the Inca poetry belong to the earlier and more highly developed civilizations. Since it is the purpose of this volume to treat of the more primitive forms of rhythm, it has seemed best to limit the illustrations to songs from tribes north of Mexico.<BR>The late Mrs. Natalie Curtis Burlin's collection of songs in The Indians' Book makes that volume quite the most representative source book for the study of Indian lyrics. The original texts of unusual range in poetic patterns, the musical settings, the interlinear translations, and the accompanying narratives add a rich context to free translations of genuine literary merit.<BR>Among other contributions to Indian song-literature, the studies of Miss Alice Cunningham Fletcher, Mr. Carlos Troyer, and Doctor Washington Matthews hold a particular charm for the investigator.<BR>Mrs. Austin's notable work, The American Rhythm, an analysis of the primitive poetic impulse, with illustrations from her own translations, came from the press after the writer's study of Indian poetic rhythms had been under way for some years. The conclusions for this volume have been limited, therefore, to those about poetic forms.<BR>The writer is greatly indebted to Mrs. Austin for her generous interest in earlier work and especially for her helpful criticism of this study.N. B.

In this debut poetry collection, Lakota storyteller Taté Walker steps into the role of a contemporary trickster to continue the purposefully disruptive legacy of a cultural icon: Iktómi, the Spider. The Trickster Riots weaves through the origins of a lost baby queer in love and spiritache to shapeshift into a momma spider exploring what it means to be a good relative, an obliterator of status quo, and a builder of community. Walker's provocative wordplay channels Iktómi with sometimes inharmonious examinations of Indigeneity. The poems weaponize (webonize?) the English language against colonial normativity and navigate the responsibilities of an urban Two Spirit writer carrying and empowering the next generations. Buckle up: The Trickster Riots journeys through fury and disaffection, libratic ceremony, and the lightning bolts of a struggling future ancestor.Taté Walker is a Lakota citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. They are an award-winning Two Spirit storyteller for outlets like "The Nation," "Everyday Feminism," "Native Peoples," "Apartment Therapy," "Indian Country Today," and "ANMLY." They are also featured in several anthologies: ¿Ohíya Walker is a Lakota citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and is also Red Lake Ojibwe and Mvskoke Creek. They are an award-winning 13-year-old nonbinary painter and graphic artist combining contemporary and traditional imagery and mediums.

This collection of Jessica Mehta's powerful, beautiful, vulnerable work spans "from dates so long ago I can't even recall" to her most current poetry in the midst of a pandemic. Her poems call our attention to the unsung disappearance of Indigenous women, the cultural genocide that still continues, the eating disorders that consume us from within, and to love, family, and the courageous choice to see the world from a different angle in the face of death.

This collection of Jessica Mehta's powerful, beautiful, vulnerable work spans "from dates so long ago I can't even recall" to her most current poetry in the midst of a pandemic. Her poems call our attention to the unsung disappearance of Indigenous women, the cultural genocide that still continues, the eating disorders that consume us from within, and to love, family, and the courageous choice to see the world from a different angle in the face of death.

Our Bearings is a collection of narrative poetry that examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in modern Minneapolis. Crafted around the four elements - earth, air, water, and fire - the poems are a beautifully layered discourse between landscapes, stories, and the people who inhabit them. Throughout the collection, McGlennen weaves the natural elements of Minnesota with rich historical commentary and current images of urban Native life. Reverence for wildlife and foliage is pierced by the sharp man-made skylines of Minneapolis while McGlennen reckons with the heavy impact of industrial progress on the souls and everyday lives of individuals.<BR><BR> While working with both traditional and contemporary form, McGlennen's unique use of space and rhythm creates poetry that is both captivating and accessible. Our Bearings does not attempt to speak for a population; rather it offers vibrant stories and moments that give voice to pieces of a large and complex tapestry of experiences. Through keen observation and a deep understanding of Native life in Minneapolis, McGlennen has created a timely collection that contributes beautifully to the important conversation about contemporary urban Native life in North America and globally.

Childhood Thoughts and Water is a collection of Beat Poetry, Spoken Word, Performance Art and Lyrical Verse. This is a work which journeys into the memories and events of an Urban Indigenous warrior's struggles to reconnect with a language and culture that is seemingly always almost out of reach. The common theme of reconnecting with nature and with water is interspersed with the imagery of childhood recollections and anecdotes about life and love, aspirations and defeats, and the desire to achieve greatness in spite of the obstacles and barriers inherent in a life lived on the fringes, in the shadows and on the streets, in the spotlight and behind the backstage curtain.

Spawn is a braided collection of brief, untitled poems, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh Reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Quebec. Undeniably political, Gill's poems ask: How can one reclaim a narrative that has been confiscated and distorted by colonizers?The poet's young avatar reaches new levels on Nintendo, stays up too late online, wakes to her period on class photo day, and carves her lovers' names into every surface imaginable. Encompassing twenty-first-century imperialism, coercive assimilation, and 90s-kid culture, the collection is threaded with the speaker's desires, her searching: for fresh water to "take the edge off," for a "habitable word," for sex. For her "true north"--her voice and her identity.Like the life cycle of the ouananiche that frames this collection, the speaker's journey is cyclical; immersed in teenage moments of confusion and life on the reserve, she retraces her scars to let in what light she can, and perhaps in the end discover what to "make of herself".

Here, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic, and portrayed with a glowing intimacy: the alphabet of a hand in the dark, the hips' silvered percussion, a thigh's red-gold geometry, the emerald tigers that leap in a throat.

In his new and selected, Jim Barnes crafts bliss from the urgent and allusive with an enigmatic voice that is often mysterious.<BR><BR>A CHOCTAW CHIEF HELPS PLAN         <BR> A FESTIVAL IN MEMORY OF         <BR> PUSHMATAHA'S BIRTHDAY<BR><BR> We know he liked chock beer and watermelon<BR> and raced sleek ponies in the dead of night.<BR> We'll give him that. We'll have to open up<BR> the valley to whites and those Chickasaws,<BR> or it's sure no go. But we'll keep it pure. . . <BR><BR> A lot depends on image. Use your masks.<BR> Don't wear boots. Speak the language if you can. . . <BR>  

Elaine Gerard's voice is a trap. She lures you in with a gentle song, then leaves your soul standing alone in the wind beneath a wild sky. This is poetry that soars with a mature song; a somehow haunted memory of a dream you wish you could remember and pray you could forget. Welcome a new voice in American poetry.

This eagerly anticipated follow-up to the breakout memoir How to Be an Indian in the 21st Century delves more deeply into the themes of family, community, grief, and the struggle to make a place in the world when your very identity is considered suspect. In Rebel Poet: More Stories from a 21st Century Indian, author Louis Clark examines the effects of his mother's alcoholism and his young sister's death, offers an intimate recounting of the backlash he faced as an Indian on the job, and celebrates the hard-fought sense of home he and his wife have created. Rebel Poet continues the author's tradition of seamlessly mixing poetry and prose, and is at turns darker and more nuanced than its predecessor.

In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and "one of our finest-and most complicated-poets" (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.

owlmouth is a collection of poems about transformation. Michele Marie Desmarais (Métis, Dakota, European) offers perspectives on the environment, being-in-relationship, the need for change and the process of healing. These poems are an expression of an Indigenous worldview replete with relationships between human and other-than-human persons. owlmouth is about the possibilities of transformation within a life—in the face of colonialism and the sometime liminal identities on the urban rez. Reflecting on experiences of historical trauma due to the Indian Residential/Boarding Schools, as well as climate change and the responsibilities we have for our relatives who include both human and other-than-human persons, owlmouth is also about intergenerational resiliency, healing and the necessities of transforming the dominant culture. Depending on the Nation or culture, an owl may bring medicine, wisdom, or death. These poems explore all three within the overall theme of transformation, and, in doing so, reflect upon belonging, home, Indigenous/Native American perspectives, and the intersection of multiple moments, beings and cultures.

This book contains poems that express thoughts, and feelings on a number of different topics of every day life. It touches on social issues, spirituality, family, love and intimacy. If you're looking for a collection of poems written from a Black perspective-diverse poems of family, spirituality, race, and social issues as well as love, loss, and intimacy-this is the one. Poems of Life and Love will satisfy your soul.

Unflinching and magnetic, the language and structure of Aurum never strays from its dedication to revealing the prominent reality of Native people being marginalized and discarded in the wake of industrial progress. While uncovering different forms of oppression that estrange Native Americans from their own land, these poems explore the raw and disturbing aspects of living in the wastelands of contemporary America.<BR><BR>Aurum does not attempt to provide answers or solutions. Instead, it splits the belly of North America and lays it bare into powerful words and unconventional structures. Brutally honest and incredibly fine tuned, this collection digs up 'the grit where teeth once rooted' to show the objectification of Native peoples and cultures for the grotesque erasure it really is.<BR><BR> With images that taunt, disturb, and fascinate, Aurum captures the vibrantly original language in Santee Frazier's first collection, Dark Thirty, while taking on a completely new voice and rhythm. Each poem is vivid and memorable, beckoning to be read again and again as the words lend an enhanced experience each time. Frazier has crafted a wrought-iron collection of poetry that never shies away from a truth that America often attempts to ignore.

In Jessica Mehta’s tenth book, Drag Me Through the Mess uncovers what it means to be an indigenous woman in a society where "NDNs" are seen as fashion accessories at best and obsolete at worst. Each poem grips the reader and reveals a king of honest emotion and telling that’s almost unnerving. All the ugliness and hurts of life are explored with a kind of lyrical beauty that causes deep contrasts and juxtapositions. No matter the subject, readers will relate to the work and themes because at the heart of each is a shared experience.The "mess" of life is one everyone shares, and Mehta touches on emotions and feelings at subcutaneous levels. Inspired by the works of Li-Young Lee, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Kim Addonizio, and all the great of confessional poetry, Mehta finds a way to tap into themes we’d rather turn away from and see them with a lens attuned to discovery—and ultimately healing.Drag Me Through the Mess takes the reader on a journey that delves into the darkest parts of the human experience before bringing them into a soothing light. Featuring perfect word choices, strong line breaks, and recurring totems that tie the collection together, Mehta’s tenth book is perhaps her strongest. It’s a collection that showcases the full spectrum of the human experience that will leave readers saying, "I thought I was the only one." It’s beyond confessional because confessions are often shrouded in shame. Here, there’s no asking of forgiveness.

Instruments of the True Measure charts the coordinates and intersections of land, history, and culture. Lyrical passages map the parallel lives of ancestral figures and connect dispossessions of the past to lived experiences of the present. Shawnee history informs the collection, and Da's fascination with uncovering and recovering brings the reader deeper into the narrative of Shawnee homeland. Images of forced removal and frontier violence reveal the wrenching loss and reconfiguration of the Shawnee as a people. The body and history become lands that are measured and plotted with precise instruments. Surveying and geography underpin the collection, but even as Da' investigates these signifiers of measurement, she pushes the reader to interrogate their function within the stark atrocities of American history. Da' laments this harsh dichotomy, observing that America's mathematical point of beginning is located in the heart of her tribe's homeland: ""I do not have the Shawnee words to describe this place; the notation that is available to me is 40°38'32.61'' N 80°31'9.76'' W.''

Poetry is the raging rapids and it is the little fish which doesn't give up until the turbulent waters are behind it. Poetry is purpose, renewal and rebirth. Ancestors' Words: My Heart Speaks is all of this and offers insight into the mind of an Indigenous man who lives with severe chronic pain and who found the strength through spirituality and poetry to put a life of alcohol abuse behind him forever.

Seven Sacred Truths presents a powerful exploration of an Indigenous woman's healing journey. Seeing the world through "brown" eyes, poet Wanda John-Kehewin makes new meaning of the past, present, and future through a consideration of Love, Wisdom, Truth, Honesty, Respect, Humility, and Courage. By sharing her views on these Seven Sacred Truths and what they meant to her growing up, John-Kehewin instigates a therapeutic process of restoration and transformation. Her Seven Sacred Truths uncovers new meaning in the written word - meaning that can be shared with others who have lived trauma or who want insight into it. John-Kehewin strives to create a safe space and provide the opportunity to experience another perspective; she invites readers to embark on their own healing journeys. The closer you are to the truth, she writes, the freer you become.<BR><BR>Wanda John-Kehewin uses writing as a therapeutic medium to understand and respond to the near-decimation of First Nations cultures and traditions. Recipient of the World Poetry Foundation's Empowered Poet Award for her first collection, In the Dog House.

R. Vincent Moniz, Jr., records the life and times of a mostly uneducated, economically disadvantaged, literary award-winning urban Indian. Much of his work reflects the people and stories from a neighborhood with the moniker Cockroach while simultaneously depicting contemporary issues of Native America. Poems in this collection are filled with a dreaded fire of wit and cynicism given to him by the Oglala and NuuÉtaare peoples who helped to raise him. With a great deal of bathos, he glides and slides seamlessly from silly to sorrow without effort. His formidable verse irradiates and acknowledges the lives of an in-between people who are too urban for the reservation and too indigenous for American culture, while he himself navigates multitudes, including his place within nerd/pop culture, which widens the scope of his writing. This collection mirrors a subculture that is being either hustled or altogether overlooked, and does so honestly without filter or worry. Moniz's poetic genetics are a blend of orators that came before him and a new wave of emerging Indigenous American voices. The reader can see these narratives twist and turn to the heartbeat he writes them in. <BR>