Poetry: Weaving the Boundary by Karenne Wood

Weaving the Boundary by Karenne Wood is, without a doubt, one of my favorite books of the year.

The very thorough summary for this poetry volume states that the collection "explores personal and collective memories and contemporary American Indian realities through lenses of human loss, desire, violence, and love." Yes it does, and, the success of that exploration originates with how Wood expresses those realities through poetry, and weaves history with contemporary issues. Her prose is gentle, lyrical or vigorous one moment, and deeply intimate the next. And haunting, always haunting! This powerful poetry collection shines with truth. Highly recommended.

All four parts of Weaving the Boundary: Keep Faith, Heights, Past Silence, and The Naming are meaningful and intense. Tough as it was to choose, I decided to highlight an excerpt from The Naming.

The Naming (excerpt)

******
Names have determined the world.
To use them, call language out whole,
immersing yourself in its sounds.
We are made from words, stories,
infinite chances through which
we imagine ourselves. Estranging
ourselves from the sensual world
in which language was born, we will die.

What if, as through history, a language
dies out, if its names cannot be uttered
or if they exist mapped
as place markers no one interprets:
Passapatanzy, Chattanooga, Saratoga?
They are part of the ground,
a language of vanishing symbols.

******

Is this what we are now?
fragmented,
a language of shattered dispersal?

Grief keeps watch
across a field darker than water.
We live in a wounded space,
voiceless cries breaking with all
utterance, even the idea of utterance.

Without a vocabulary, how
does the story continue? in words
that have murdered the people
before us, their voices airborne
like corn pollen, out into the desert?

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About the Author: Karenne Wood holds an MFA in poetry from George Mason University and a PhD in linguistic anthropology from the University of Virginia. She is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation and has served on the Monacan Tribal Council for many years. She directs the Virginia Indian Programs at the Virginia Foundation for Humanities.

Highlighting: Weaving the Boundary by Karenne Wood

Evocative, haunting, and ultimately hopeful, Karenne Wood’s Weaving the Boundary explores personal and collective memories and contemporary American Indian realities through lenses of human loss, desire, violence, and love.

This focused, accessible collection carries readers into a deep and intimate understanding of the natural world, the power of language, and the interconnectedness of life. Untold stories are revealed through documented events in various tribal histories, and indictments of destructive encounters between Western colonialism and Native peoples are juxtaposed with a lyric voice that gently insists on reweaving the past, honoring women and all life, creating a sovereign space for indigenous experience. Wood writes, “Nothing was discovered. Everything was already loved.”

Political yet universal, Weaving the Boundary tells of love and betrayal, loss and forgiveness. Wood intertwines important and otherwise untold stories and histories with a heightened sense of awareness of Native peoples’ issues and present realities.

Moving from elegy to evocations of hope and desire, the poems call for respect toward Mother Earth and feminine sensibility. One hears in this collection a longing to be carried deeper into the world, to return to tradition, to nature, to truth, to an innate belonging in the “weaving” of all life.

Publisher: The University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: March 24, 2016
$16.95 Paper; Electronic edition available
96 Pages, 6 x 9

Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice ed. Francisco X. Alarcón, Odilia Galván Rodríguez

On April 20, 2010, nine Latino students chained themselves to the main doors of the Arizona State Capitol in an act of civil disobedience to protest Arizona’s SB 1070. Moved by the students’ actions, that same day Francisco X. Alarcón responded by writing a poem in Spanish and English titled “Para Los Nueve del Capitolio/ For the Capitol Nine,” which he dedicated to the students. The students replied to the poem with a collective online message. To share with the world what was taking place, Alarcón then created a Facebook page called “Poets Responding to SB 1070” and posted the poem, launching a powerful and dynamic forum for social justice.

Since then, more than three thousand original contributions by poets and artists from around the globe have been posted to the page. Poetry of Resistance offers a selection of these works, addressing a wide variety of themes, including racial profiling, xenophobia, cultural misunderstanding, violence against refugees, shared identity, and much more. Bringing together more than eighty writers, the anthology powerfully articulates the need for change and the primacy of basic human rights. Each poem shows the heartfelt dedication these writers and artists have to justice in a world that has become larger than borders.

Poetry of Resistance is a poetic call for tolerance, reflection, reconciliation, and healing.

The events that occurred in Arizona in 2010, and Arizona's SB 1070, were the subject of extensive discussions and debates at my home and among friends and family. As immigrants, none of us took these events lightly, particularly since at the time it seemed to be setting a dangerous precedent that would affect the civil rights of a large percentage of the population. As a result, I found myself identifying with many of the poems included in Poetry of Resistance.

In today's toxic and divisive political atmosphere, this powerful poetry volume is both relevant and sorely needed. Perhaps more so than ever.

As an example, I've chosen to highlight one of my many favorite poems.

OLMECAN EYES

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Olmecan eyes gaze into the future,
a path of light piercing the forest,
heavy lidded with the past, ancient
sorrows carved into stone. With rain,
the present leaks into now, into the DNA
of fallen stars, the mystery of oceans
the settled silt of settling into culture

Olmecan eyes reborn. The infant
stone unfurling in our navels.
Another civilization reconquers
the wilderness of today. Sun devouring
Earth, we are shadows of the way
we were, beneath the shifting planets,
the comets, the desolate inconsolable moon.

Into the history of obsidian blades,
a human heart beats on the plate,
the slate of our division thinning
into someone's blood. The blood of
The People surging still beneath
the pursed lips, the pierced tongue,
the sudden pulse. We are The People

still. Our constitution stolen
from us in the fear. We rise, not
vengeful, but full of the peace
of knowing, our present tense.

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Juan Felipe Herrera, U.S. Poet Laureate: "Borders can be overcome with the revolutionary tenderness of poems. This anthology is an incredible assemblage of voices and letters that proves that collective poetry is the answer to the violence-filled policies that increasingly face us in these times."