A beautifully illustrated edition of Poet Laureate Joy Harjo's poem Washing My Mother's Body, which offers a way through grief when the loss appears unbearable.

As I wash my mother's face, I tell her
how beautiful she is, how brave, how her beauty and bravery
live on in her grandchildren. Her face is relaxed, peaceful.
Her earth memory body has not left yet,
but when I see her the next day, embalmed and in the casket
in the funeral home, it will be gone.
Where does it go?

Through lyrical prose and evocative watercolor illustrations by award-winning Muscogee artist Dana Tiger, Washing My Mother's Body explores the complexity of a daughter's grief as she reflects on the joys and sorrows of her mother's life. She lays her mother to rest in the landscape of her memory, honoring the hands that raised her, the body that protected her, and the legs that carried her mother through adversity.

Moving, comforting, and deeply emotional, Washing My Mother's Body is a tender look at mother-daughter relationships, the complexity of grieving the loss of a parent, and the enduring love of those left behind.

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket traverses the Southwest landscape, exploring intricate relationships between Native peoples and the natural world, land, pop culture, twentieth-century music, and multi-generational representations. Oscillating between musical influences, including the repercussions of ethnomusicology, and the present/past/future, the collection rewrites and rerights what it means to be Indigenous, queer, and even formerly-emo in the twenty-first century.

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

This is an incredibly powerful book of poetry that is also fiction but it is so real, and singular, as to defy definition, and I defy anyone to read it and come away unchanged. --Tommy Orange, author of There There and Wandering Stars

A stunning, multimorphic work of poetry and prose about Indigenous identity

mother is a work rooted in an intimate fracture: an Indigenous child is adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family. As an adult finding her way back to her origins, our unnamed narrator begins to put the pieces of her birth family's history together through the stories told to her by her mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom remained on the reservation where she was born. Through oral histories, family lore, and imagined pasts and futures, a collage of their community emerges, raising profound questions about adoption, inheritance, and Indigenous identity in America.

Through poetic vignettes whose unconventional forms mirror the nonlinear, patchwork process of constructing a sense of self, m.s. RedCherries has crafted an indelible and utterly original work about the winding roads that lead us home.

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry

WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics.

--from WHEREAS Statements

WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. I am, she writes, a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation--and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live. This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

Over a long, influential career in poetry, Joy Harjo has been praised for her warm, oracular voice (John Freeman, Boston Globe) that speaks from a deep and timeless source of compassion for all (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR). Her poems are musical, intimate, political, and wise, intertwining ancestral memory and tribal histories with resilience and love.

In this gemlike volume, Harjo selects her best poems from across fifty years, beginning with her early discoveries of her own voice and ending with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. Generous notes on each poem offer insight into Harjo's inimitable poetics as she takes inspiration from Navajo horse songs and jazz, reckons with home and loss, and listens to the natural messengers of the earth. As evidenced in this transcendent collection, Joy Harjo's poetry is light and elixir, the very best prescription for us in wounded times (Sandra Cisneros, Millions).

Intimate, dissecting, and liberating, Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture--the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond--fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.

Cloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world around you--and introduces readers to a profound new voice in poetry.

In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a magician and a master (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.

Finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize

The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man--available for the first time in the United States

i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative. Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is a prayer against breaking, writes trans Anishinaabe and M tis poet Gwen Benaway. By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we've been waiting for.

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to cut a hole in the sky / to world inside. Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where everyone is at least a little gay. Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.

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.

Poem-songs summon the voices of Anishinaabe ancestors and sing to future generations

The ancestors that walk with us, sing us our song. When we get quiet enough, we can hear them sing and make them audible to people today. In Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium, Marcie R. Rendon, a member of the White Earth Nation, summons those ancestors' songs, and so begins the dream singing for generations yet to come. The Anishinaabe heard stories in their dream songs, Ojibwe author Gerald Vizenor wrote, and like those stories once inscribed in pictographs on birch-bark scrolls, Rendon's poem-songs evoke the world still unfolding around us, reflecting our place in time for future generations.

Through dream-songs and poem-songs responding to works of theater, choral music, and opera, Rendon brings memory to life, the senses to attention--to see the moonbeams blossoming on the windowsill, to feel the hold of the earth, to hear the echo of grandmother's breath, to lie on the bones of ancestors and feel the rhythms of silence running deep. Her singing, breaking the boundaries that time would impose, carries the Anishinaabe way of life and way of seeing forward in the world.

This collection gathers poems from throughout Joy Harjo's twenty-eight-year career, beginning in 1973 in the age marked by the takeover at Wounded Knee and the rejuvenation of indigenous cultures in the world through poetry and music. How We Became Human explores its title question in poems of sustaining grace.

Wilma Mankiller was not known as a poet. With a tip from her husband, Charlie Soap, and her friend, Kristina Kiehl, Pulley Press founders learned that Mankiller had been writing poetry throughout her life. After searching through her barn at Mankiller Flats in Adair County Oklahoma, Greg Shaw and Frances McCue located 19 of the 20 poems published here. The 20th came from the collection of Kristina Kiehl. The poems show Mankiller's engagement with her own artistry and reflection upon her life, particularly her Native heritage and the role of women in the world.

Readers of Mankiller Poems might include other poets, amateur and professional historians, those interested in America's indigenous heroes, women's rights activists, political and civic leaders, young adults who are interested in leadership and all those who want to see another side of an inspiring leader. How the Chief of the Cherokee Nation wrote poems as a means of reflection on her life reveals a unique perspective on how art, and these poems in particular, may have enhanced Mankiller's own leadership. Her empathy is palpable and her quick wit and loving temperament, all wrapped in the artistry of verse, shines here.

First published in 1983 and now considered a classic, She Had Some Horses is a powerful exploration of womanhood's most intimate moments. Joy Harjo's poems speak of women's despair, of their imprisonment and ruin at the hands of men and society, but also of their awakenings, power, and love.

The American Book Award-winning collection from The best poet in Indian Country (Sherman Alexie, New York Times-bestselling author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven).

Hailed by the Bloomsbury Review as the nation's foremost contemporary Native American poet and by Sherman Alexie as the best poet in Indian Country, Ray Young Bear draws on ancient Meskwaki tradition and modern popular culture to create poems that provoke, astound, and heal.

This indispensable volume, which contains three previously published collections--Winter of the Salamander (1979), The Invisible Musician (1990), and The Rock Island Hiking Club (2001)--as well as Manifestation Wolverine, a brilliant series of new pieces inspired by animistic beliefs, a Lazy-Boy recliner, and the word songs Young Bear sang to his children, is a testament to the singularity of the poet's talent and the astonishing range of his voice.

2021 Oklahoma Book Award Winner and Colorado Book Award Winner

Linda Hogan... speaks to us the way a trusted friend might, inviting you to take warmth by the hearth. Her verses teach us how to live with dignity in a world bent on destruction and show why it is important to fight for the planet.
--ANA CASTILLO

Poems from Linda Hogan explore new and old ways of experiencing the vagaries of the body and existing in harmony with earth's living beings. Throughout this clear-eyed collection, Hogan tenderly excavates how history instructs the present, and envisions a future alive with hope for a healthy and sustainable world that now wavers between loss and survival.

A wild, seductive debut collection that presents a powerful journey of struggle and healing-and a spellbinding brew of folklore, movies, music, and ritual.

Draw me encircled // in something // other than gasoline. The poems of Rose Quartz hum with the naked energy of one who has found her way home after a journey rife with difficulty and who has the scars to show for it. In them, Sasha taqwsəblu LaPointe moves from intimate scenes of peril--a car accident, an unwelcome advance at a party, a miscarriage--to the salvific, exhilarating punk scene of the Pacific Northwest and the centering shores of her Coast Salish ancestors. Along the way, she peers into the darker corners of her own search for belonging, and finds there glittering stones dense with meaning and the power to move forward.

As game to follow a beckoning Laura Palmer into the burning woods as she is to step into the shoes of Little Red Riding Hood as she lays waste to her wolf, LaPointe explores the sublime space between beauty and danger through lush, almost baroque, use of folktale and color. Red, white, blue, and an amalgam that is none of the above--rose--vie for the speaker's embrace as a mixed-race woman. Here, poems become offerings, rituals, incantations conjured in the name of healing and power.

Like the stones and cards laid on an altar, Rose Quartz offers a reading at the intersection of identity and myth, trauma and truth, telling the story of past, present, and future.

Yáamay: An Anthology of Feminine Perspectives Across Indigenous California is a collection of Indigenous poetry, artwork, and essays specific to what is now known as Southern California. The lead authors separated these pieces into the four natural parts of our story: Tówla (Root), Kúp (Sleep, Dormant), Wólnish (Cultivate), and $ó'a (Bloom), with each section exploring the eras of pre-contact, post-contact, present, and future.

Collectively, these pieces portray the multifarious effects of colonization on Indigenous people of this area, from the California Mission system, to the traumatic assimilationist policies that are still felt today. At the same time, a focus on ancestral teachings, the nostalgia of growing up on the rez, and the joys of (self)love and independence can be found in a way that defies these wounds.

Now is the time for us to tell our stories before they are written for us by anthropologists, archeologists, historians, or non-Indians. When we write for ourselves and tell our own stories, we remind the world that we are still present, existing, and resisting. We are not a part of history, but rather a continuously flourishing community of modern Indigenous people who march defiantly into the future.

* FINALIST FOR THE 2023 CALIBA GOLDEN POPPY BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY *

Drawing its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, this remarkable debut collection reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. Through an array of brief lyrics, visual forms, chronologies, and sequences, these virtuosic poems trace a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment.

Removal Acts takes its speaker's fraught methods of accessing the past as both subject and material: family photos, the fragile artifacts of primary documents, and the digital abyss of web browsers and word processors. Alongside studies of two of her Dakota ancestors, Lynch has assembled an intimate record of recovery from bulimia, insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. In these rigorous, scrutinizing examinations of removal in its many forms--as physical displacement, archival absence, Whiteness, and vomit--Lynch has crafted a harrowing portrait of the entwined relationship between the personal and historical. The result is a powerful affirmation of resilience and resolute presence in the face of eradication.

I write from a continuous space of erasure. Poetry was the one way that I was able to hold onto...my history, geography, and language. -- Craig Santos Perez, contributor
In this groundbreaking anthology of Indigenous poetry and prose, Native poems, stories, and essays are informed with a knowledge of both what has been lost and what is being restored. It offers a diverse collection of stories told by Indigenous writers about themselves, their histories, and their present. It is a celebration of culture and the possibilities of language.
Featuring forty-four poets, including Ishmael Hope, Bojan Louis, Ruby Murray, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso, Joy Harjo, dg okpik, Sherwin Bitsui, Heid E. Erdrich, Layli Long Soldier, and Orlando White.
Original influence essays by Diane Glancy on Lorca, Chrystos on Audre Lorde, Louise Erdrich on Elizabeth Bishop, LeAnne Howe on W. D. Snodgrass, Allison Hedge Coke on Delmore Schwartz, Suzanne Rancourt on Ai, and M. L. Smoker on Richard Hugo, among others.
And, a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists.
There really is no better anthology out there that collects indigenous poets publishing from 1960 to the present. -- Dean Rader, co-editor

Sovereignty, vulnerability, honesty. --Ms. Magazine

it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson's debut collection of poetry:

i am five

my sisters are saying boy

i do not know what the word means but--

i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b,

the hollowness of the o, the blade of y