Description
Book SynopsisApprenticed to Justice is a collection of vividly rendered lyrical and narrative poems that trace the complex inheritances of Indigenous America, this “strange map drawn of blood and history.” It opens with intriguing glimpses of individuals—a mother “born of dawn / in a reckless moon of miscegenation,” cousins “who rotated authority / on marbles sex and skunk etiquette,” women “planting dreams with dank names like rutabaga and kohlrabi”—and it turns on the notion of legacy. From what dark turmoil of earth do we emerge? How and what do we inherit? To what mesh of tangled origins do we live apprenticed? These are the literal and the metaphorical questions Anishinaabe author Kimberly Blaeser asks in this, her third collection of poetry.
Grounded in rich details of places from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to the arctic region of Kirkenes, Norway, the poems link the people and the landscapes through storytelling. Narratives range from the comedy of a missing outhouse floor to the longing for the return of an MIA. The storied landscapes of the poems, the “Rocky bottom allotted land(s) / twenty-eight slow horse miles / from the village store,” also become intertwined with tribal history. And the remembered tribal accounts of scorched earth campaigns or the Trail of Tears in their turn become enmeshed with contemporary justice issues including Potlatch’s relentless clear cutting of forest lands and the strange cannibalism inherent in Sr. Inez Hilger’s study of “other” cultures like that at Blaeser’s home, White Earth Reservation. Ultimately, attention to these justice issues invoke the lives of tribal elders whose figurative “fragile houses / pegged at the corners with only hope” somehow represent and teach survival. Finally, each movement in the book connects back to the act of writing, to the poems themselves as both remembrance and a kind of revolution—“these fingers / drumming on keys.”
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- I. THE TURN WE TAKE
- Family Tree
- Shadow Sisters
- A Boxer Grandfather
- Mashkawapide
- Jingles You Made
- The Womanless Wedding
- The More I Learn of Men’s Plumbing
- MIA, Foreign and Domestic
- II. THAT WHICH REFUSES PRETENTION
- Cranes flushed from a field
- Some Kind of Likeness
- The Spirit of Matter
- grace of crossings
- Somewhere on the Verge
- Two Oak Stories
- Gelatin tadpoles
- Boundaries
- Memories of Rock
- Listing Ecstatic
- Drawing Breath
- Seasonal: Blue Winter, Kirkenes Fire
- Rain-soaked snowman’s scarf
- Wild turkeys at field gate
- House Work
- 20 September
- Ooh…Ahh!
- Haiku Journey
- Northern follows jig
- III. TO TRAVEL WITH YOU
- Of Wind and Trees
- Fingers paused on keyboard
- Told at Beartooth in July
- Sun through window slats
- Something Deep Like Copper
- If I Laid Them End to End
- Indian in Search of an Entourage
- Bizaan
- Page Proofs
- Goodbye to All That
- Railroad Song
- Stories of Fire
- This Dance
- IV. . . . IN THE AFTERMATH OF EVERY WAR
- Red Lake 70
- Housing Conditions of One Hundred Fifty Chippewa Families
- Dictionary for a New Century
- The Things I Know
- Who Talks Politics
- Fantasies of Women
- V. GONE. OR GONE ON. AGAIN
- What They Did by Lamplight
- Refractions
- Crunch of booted feet
- Resisting Shape or Language
- Weavings For Cousins Who Died Too Young
- July 29, 2002
- Apprenticed to Justice
