Description
Book SynopsisIt 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.
Table of Contents
- 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
