Description
Book SynopsisWritten from a contemporary Cherokee, Queer, and mixed-race experience, Walking with Ghosts: Poems confronts the legacy of land-theft, genocide, and forced removal of Cherokees from their homelands while simultaneously resisting ongoing attacks on both Indigenous and Gay/ Lesbian/ Bisexual /Transgender (GLBT) communities. The debut work of Qwo-Li Driskill, a young Cherokee poet also of African, Irish, Lenape, Lumbee, and Osage ancestries, these poems move across Cherokee history. From the infamous Trail of Tears and the Allotment Act to the Indian boarding school system and contemporary manifestations of racism, these poems reach into Cherokee collective memory asking its readers to not only remember the history of colonization, but also the survival and continuance of Indigenous Nations. With this collection Driskill, who identifies as Queer as well as Two-Spirit (a contemporary term used in North American Indigenous communities to describe diverse sexual and gender identities) becomes one of only a few of American Indian Queer/Two-Spirit male writers in print. Refusing to compromise identities, Driskill also grapples with the impact of hate crimes on GLBT communities, multiracial and multi-tribal identity, the AIDS crisis, psychic trauma, and war. Yet the poems in this collection are rooted in a sense of love and the power of words to heal the legacies of colonization and other forms of violence. Cherokee love poems weave into eulogies to the dead while ghosts draw the living into a place of wholeness. Tender, startling, confrontational and erotic, this book honors the dead and brings the survivors back home.
Table of Contents
- Tal’-s-go Gal’-quo-gi Di-del’-qua-s-do-di Tsa-la-gi Di-go-whe-li/ Beginning Cherokee
- Map of the Americas
- Going Home
- For Arabs and Indians and Others who Love Cedars
- Ghost Dances
- Love Poems for Billy Jack
- Summer Haiku
- To Your Rude Question, What’s Your Pedigree? A Response
- High Yella Sonnet
- Wild Indians
- What You Must Do
- For Marsha P. (Pay It No Mind!) Johnson
- In Our Oldest Language
- Letter to Tsi-ge’-yu
- For Matthew
- The Leading Causes of Death Among American Indians
- Snapshot
- Eulogy for the 40th
- Grandmother Spider’s Lesson for an Urban Indian Queer
- Gay Nigger Number One
- Lullaby
- What You Gave Me
- Allotment T’ang
- On Hearing Another Friend Was Raped
- Love Poems: 1838–1839
- Evening With Andrew Jackson
- Mutiny
- Song of Removal
- Back to the Blanket
- Story
- Night Terrors
- Two Approaches to Memory
- I Want to Bite Words
- Book of Memory
- Miracle, For Colin
- At the Queer Conference Dinner
- Blessing
- A Long Story Made Short
- Legacy
- Chantway for FC
